“I have never heard of a Mennonite church that celebrates Pride month”, she said.

I laughed. 

“Well, as a friend of mine once said, if you have been to one Mennonite church, you have been to one Mennonite church”. 

I recognize not many Mennonite churches celebrate Pride month. But not many of them celebrate Black History month, either, and we do that, and for the same reason – because we have Black members, and we want to lift them up and celebrate who they are. Likewise, we have Queer members, and we want to ift and celebrate them as well. 

It has been argued that these are not Christian observances, like Christmas or Easter, and thus have no place in a Christian church service. But I have sat through any number of Mother’s Day services, and it’s not a recognized Christian feast either – instead, we do it to celebrate the mothers among us. And Mennonites don’t have a Pope or magisterium anyway, to tell us what we are allowed to celebrate or aren’t. 

But to my larger point, I don’t believe there are sacred days and secular days – I actually don’t believe there is secular anything. I believe there is only the sacred and the desecrated. 

Our Queer members are made in the image of God, are made by God, and are beloved of and by God. They are part of us, and we are on their side. 

But we don’t just celebrate Pride because of our current Queer members. We also do it to recognize the ways we screwed up in the past.

Over the years I have been a pastor, I have talked to many Queer people who used to go to church. We were willing to baptize them. Willing to let them come to our Sunday Schools and our Vacation Bible Schools and send them off on summer mission trips. But when they came to us and told us who they were, they were no longer welcome. Or worse, they didn’t feel safe telling us – they just left. 

I’m sure that’s happened here at Open Door – it has happened everywhere. Right now we don’t have any teens or kids at Open Door – but one day we will. And I never want a kid that came to my church to grow up and discern they are Queer and feel like the only option available to them is to leave the church, or worse yet, to believe that God doesn’t love them, celebrate them, and acknowledge them. Queer kids in our church will see people like them on Sunday morning, will worship beside people like them, and they will see people like them celebrated as beloved children of God. 

Because they are. 

Over the last few weeks, I moved my home office into a new room. This meant that everything that was in the old office must be touched, sorted, and moved, which is a lovely time to decide if you want to keep it. Things also break when they are moved, or sometimes get lost.

Three moves equal a fire, they say.

But one of the first things to get hung on the wall of the new office, just over the desk where I write my sermons every week, is my Ordination certificate.

I was ordained as a minister in the Mennonite Church USA on a cold March day in North Carolina, surrounded by people who loved me and knew me, and who had recognized my gifts, and wanted to formalize that recognition by a ceremony.

The ceremony wasn’t the important part. Neither was the certificate. It was the recognition that counted.

It still is.

We Mennonites tend to distrust messages from God when the only person hearing them is the person themselves. If God has called you to be a minister, it doesn’t make sense to us that the only person who hears that call is you. God calls us through our community.

I’m not a minister because I decided to be – at the end of the day I’m a minister because people who worshiped with me, who prayed with me, and who had eaten countless potlucks with me told me that I was. The piece of paper was just to make it official.

A friend tells the story about a party he was at where the guest list included an elderly man and a 6-year-old girl. The man was sitting on the couch and the little girl was beside him, talking his ear off. Suddenly she stopped mid-sentence and said, innocently, “Oh! You’re blind!”

The man laughed, and said, “I know”.

The girl asked, in that innocent way only children can, if he had been born blind, or if something happened to him. The man replied that he had been born blind.

The child paused, and then said, “That’s so sad. That means you have never seen how beautiful you are.”

I love that story because I think that it’s the job of our community to tell us the things we can’t always see for ourselves. Sometimes it is how beautiful we are when we cannot see it, and sometimes it is how we are making a mess without realizing it, and sometimes it is believing things for us when we just cannot believe it to be true. And sometimes, it is to tell us that we are a minister, whether we knew it or not.

Later, I would become the pastor here at Open Door – not because I declared myself to be, but because people here knew me and trusted me and saw things in me that sometimes, I have a hard time seeing in myself.

Whatever authority I have as a pastor comes not from a certificate or a diploma or a title, but from the consent and call of the pastored. This work we do here is collaborative work, and church is a collective noun.

And I’m glad I get to do that work with you.

Long ago, there was a village, and at the gate of the village sat the village elder. He served as a sort of judge, settling disputes, hearing stories, and offering advice when asked.

One morning, there was a large caravan heading their way. They saw the dust first, and then slowly across the desert they saw a string of camels and wagons and people headed their way. Eventually they stopped, and a man from the front of the pack walked over to the village elder.

“Good morning,” he said. “My family and I are moving to this land, looking for opportunity and work, and we heard good things about this village. Tell me – what are the people like here?”

The elder looked at the man, at his caravan of people and animals, and said, “Well, that’s a good question. Tell me – what were the people like where you moved from?”

“Oh – them!” The man said. “They were scoundrels and thugs. They gossiped constantly, they would steal you blind if you were not looking, and they never had a kind word to say. I hated it there.”

The elder nodded his head and said, “Ahhh. Sadly, I think you will find the people here the same way. If I were you, I would keep on moving.”

And the man thanked the elder, and the caravan kept moving.

That afternoon, the elder saw a plume of dust on the horizon, and then slowly it turned into camels and wagons and people. Eventually they stopped, and a man from the front of the pack walked over to the village elder.

“Good morning,” he said. “My family and I are moving to this land, looking for opportunity and work, and we heard good things about this village. Tell me – what are the people like here?”

The elder looked at the man, at his caravan of people and animals, and said, “Well, that’s a good question. Tell me – what were the people like where you moved from?”

“Oh – them!” The man said. “They were amazing. They were always quick to help out, they shared whatever they had, and they looked for ways to make sure you were taken care of. I miss them so much – were it not for our need to find a better way to make a living, we would have stayed there forever.

The elder nodded his head and said, “Ahhh. I think you will find the people here are just as kind and loving. I know we would welcome you and your family here.”

The man thanked the elder, and led his caravan into the village.

I love that story. Because the question isn’t what is the world like around us, but what sort of world are we looking for. What do we expect to find? How do we expect people to act? And in the story, the elder asked both men what they were looking for. And when their vision matched the vision of his community, he invited them to stay. He invited them to come and see.

In the first chapter of the gospel of John, there is this weird little passage, right in the middle of a larger story.

The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.”

John is talking to his disciples, and along comes Jesus. John tells the disciples what he knows about Jesus, and to the disciples, it sounds amazing. They drop John and head off down the road after Jesus. They are all excited about being with the Jesus Movement now.

You know these kind of people. They join the cool new church, or they take up crossfit, or they start doing Paleo, or become vegan, or start using essential oils, or whatever. And they have been in this new way of life for virtually no time at all, but they are super excited about it, and they want you to be super excited about it, too.

So here, John’s disciples know virtually nothing about Jesus, and they are ready to throw John over and follow Jesus. I wonder why that was. What made them dissatisfied with John – enough so they were willing to throw him over for Jesus? In any event, they are looking for something new, and then they find Jesus.

And Jesus stops them, and rather than signing them up then and there, instead of building his church and “increasing his membership” and “optimizing his base”, he asks them a question:

“What are you looking for?”

He knew they were looking for a new world, and he invited them to come and see. 

Open Door is a small church. A tiny church, even. And to be blunt, we need to grow if we are to remain viable. And when you need to grow, the temptation is to grab every warm body that passes by, that shows a fleeting interest in you, or who heard you have a great preacher (ahem) or awesome potlucks, and sign them up quick, before they figure out that it’s much more about who they are and what they are looking for, than it is about who we as a church is.

But we didn’t want to be that sort of church. So recently, our leadership team has asked ourselves some hard questions about what sort of community we really are, and what kind of community we want to be. In short, we have had to ask ourselves what we are looking for.

What sort of church do we want to be? How do we want to live with each other? How do we want to engage the world around us? And out of all the work that needs to be done in this city, what specific work is ours to do?

As a result of this process, our congregation has been going through a lot of changes, and more are yet to come.

We are working to become the church we thought we want to be – a church that welcomes and affirms whoever shows up, a church that honors the gifts we all bring, a church that seeks to learn the ways of peacemaking, justice, and hospitality. We are moving from the church we were into the church we dream of being.

But we are not yet done.

Because while we have decided what sort of church we want to be, we have decided who we are and what we are doing – while we have done all that work – what remains now for us is to live into that vision, to do that work, to build that world we want to live in.

And then, when we find people who are looking for a new world, we can invite them to come and see.