The Lord be with you!
Back in August of 2020, I started at my internship site, First English Lutheran Church in Platteville. The administrative assistant at the time told me she was sorry that I would be spending my time there during such a tumultuous event. I understood that my experience in that first year would be unusual, but I didn’t necessarily feel the same grief as her because I didn’t know what I was missing out on the way she did (though I also didn’t know that that unusual first year would turn into two unusual years). While I’m grateful for those first couple years in ministry that were so different than the usual pattern, I also remember how lackluster worship services often felt when people were finally allowed to start coming back into the pews but were still masked and social distanced, and the service was altered with no communion and no singing.
It was very important to the congregation there to get back to our usual pattern of worship, especially to start singing again. I remember the first Sunday the hymns were brought back, I expected possibly the loudest singing I had ever heard – it had been nearly two years since they had last sung hymns in that sanctuary! I was unnerved, then, when the singing turned out to be quite tepid. The sanctuary was the same, the hymns were the same, the God we had come to worship was the same, yet it was somehow not the same. Intermingled with the familiar was the collective experience of grief. But the most unsettling thing about it all was that that grief was present before the COVID-19 shutdown, because there has been a changing cultural landscape in the U.S. for many years that has brought loss to our churches. The pandemic in many churches simply accelerated the already tenuous relationship between church and world.
I know that FLC experienced many of the same upheavals and loss during the pandemic – the same collective grief – and while I’m honored and grateful to be your pastor (and I hope to be here a long while), I know there is likely grief you are carrying from these last few years. I know this not because you are not enthusiastic enough about ministry together or the future of FLC, but because there has been so much change in so short amount of time. As we continue this first year of ministry, I don’t want anyone in this congregation to think (consciously or not) that you must hide away the grief, that this most recent change will turn the page, and any recognition of our collective grief would just be dwelling on the past. In my previous work with hospice, I know one of the most common responses to grief is to attempt to “rush” through it and find oneself on the “other side” back to normalcy. It is my belief that if this first year will continue into a fruitful ministry together, we must together acknowledge whatever grief it is we are carrying and heal together.
To take that first step, I want to put forward a few questions I recently came across at a webinar I attended that I believe could be helpful in getting conversation started. As you consider these questions, consider also the last five years and what you hope in the coming five years. I present these questions to you with the sincere hope that you will respond to me with your answers. This can be done anonymously by placing answers to these questions in the basket labeled on the narthex table, you can email me your answers at , or you can stop into my study at the church – my office hours are currently Tuesday 10-12 and Friday 10-2. I’m here to listen.
The questions for your consideration:
- What’s one wish you have for your congregation?
- What’s something that used to happen (or used to be true) in the congregation that you wish would return?
- What’s something you fear might be lost as your congregation moves into the future?
- What’s something that has changed that you feel is a loss in the life of the congregation?
The peace of Christ be in you,
Pr. Andrew
Read more from the October Newsletter and previous newsletters. Also visit the Calendar page to know more about Faith Lutheran Church in Columbus, Wisconsin.