Partly as an effort to make church life more participatory and less a spectator experience, Pastor Olson at the congregational church in rural mid-Michigan invited members and friends who attend the weekly worship services to send him their questions about just about anything related to the religious traditions, teachings, and personal grasp of all things spiritual. The illustration above, included with permission, comes from May 2021, although the first cycle of questions started in spring 2019. Each summer the question list has gotten a little more ambitious, involved, and personal as worshipers become more comfortable asking questions.
The texts, phone calls, conversations and emails sent to the minister take many forms, but this compilation streamlines the collection by grouping related matters into one of four general subject areas. As a point of comparison, it would be great to see a similar interchange of minds and hearts from a generation ago, when mainline Protestant church life was altogether bigger and institutions of Christianity were generally richer in all meanings of the word. Or taking another line of comparison, it might shed some light on the present moment by taking the questions that fellow Christians other than Congregationalists, including Orthodox, Catholic, and all manner of Protestant church-goers might express. For now, though, the question list here offers a glimpse of subjects that interest 2021 worshipers in one church in rural mid-Michigan more than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic and dependent on Zoom video-based worshiping as the latest surge in hospitalizations is waning and vaccination rates across the state of Michigan have reached about 55% of residents age 16 and older.
“How God Works” is the first subset of questions from members and friends of the church. One strand is about exclusivity of Jesus’ way — open to all, but once following the path then excluding other forms. Another is about the subject of Satan — figurative or clear and present danger. Then, akin to Buddhism’s focus on duhkha (human suffering from inevitable losses), what does God mean by filling this world with entropy and separation. Seen as a whole, the people who have put their wonderings into the form of questions to the pastor are trying to make sense of God’s presence and voice nowadays: what is the nature of God when so much of lived experience is distressing: decay, evil, exclusivist control.
“Faith and Science” is the subheading for a couple of questions about ways of knowing truth; the kind that can be observed visually, but also the kind that defies logic and possibly seems counterintuitive or paradoxical. For example, can the working hypotheses and stated assumptions in science be compatible with ways of thinking and knowing expressed on the pages of the Bible? Is the hand of God still enacting the Creation Story or instead is the Creator no longer directly shaping matters big and small? Maybe heaven can reveal an inkling of its nature by drawing on both science and religion. Questions about the intersections and scope of subjects suited to science versus ones unsuited to science suggest that the 2021 worshipers recognize that both forms of knowing are valuable, but that the exact relationship is unclear.
“Faith and Society” is the next group of questions sent in to the minister to put into the summer series, “Your Questions, Straight Answers.” The two topics swirling around current developments that prompted questions are about how to think about LGBTQ personal, societal, legal, and church-body relationships; also about right to die (euthanasia) circumstances and significance. In the minds of many people living today through rapid social change, familiar reference points keep disappearing or changing their meanings. Being able to reckon one’s understanding of “what Jesus would do” with what the eyes see and the mind dwells on can be hard to do individually and as an organized body of believers. Certainly, there are other subjects in modern lives to try and connect with Jesus’ teachings, but among these from a Michigan small town it is matters of sex, gender, and sexuality, along with dying with dignity that rise to the surface. Underlying the questions of how to live and how to die in modern life is the deeper question of one’s identity: self-identity and seen in the eyes of others. Times change, but does one’s being and heart also change? And will one’s relationship to God and to Neighbors (summation of all God’s teachings: to love one’s neighbor as oneself, and to love God) remain unchanged while society itself convulses?
The last subheading in the submitted questions for summer sermons is “Faith and Practice,” how to operationalize some of the noble thoughts, inspiring words, and Jesus-era examples of relating to others. What to do when one’s cherished Christian tradition is bullied by non-believer and unbelievers; how important is membership at one institution (versus nomadic follower of Jesus); in practice is it best always to forgive the person causing injury, even when that decision causes still more injury; and how to live under consumer society and pop culture but still urgently seek after God’s will and way. All of these questions concern the ways to act within the scale of family and friends and on stage where one’s own life plays. As a group, these questions about real-life words and deeds point to moments when belief meets actual lived conditions. Rather than to treat one’s spiritual life as a trophy to polish and safely display on a shelf, or to confine God to a lockbox of one’s own design that can be opened up on Sundays during the worship service, the people asking these questions are itching to integrate the imagery and values learned from Bible records into everyday life. In other words, despite generally falling church attendance nationwide, those who do remain seem to be the ones committed to living out the life that Jesus and the apostles describe; not to spectate but to be active players on the field of mortal life.
In conclusion, the sample size here is just one Congregational church in rural mid-Michigan with perhaps a dozen or two people composing thoughtful questions to send to the minister for consideration in the 2021 summer series of sermons, “Your Questions, Straight Answers” (live and recorded via Zoom still 18 months after Covid began to spread). So these particular topics can only be called anecdotal, rather than systematic or statistically significant. But they do offer a window on the minds and hearts of worshipers holding tightly to generations of religious tradition, even as one wave of social change after another crashes onto the community, eroding contours one day and heaping new soil onto the shore after another day. This glimpse of what one spiritual path means today among Jesus followers is a precious thing that offers hope that as times change, the living tradition also can change, even as the relationship to God and one’s neighbor provides a steadfast foundation for how to live and be.
