What are New Missional Communities?
Future Church Pilots emerged from St. Lydia’s Dinner Church, a fifteen-year-old New Missional Community (NMC) in Brooklyn that has grown from a new church plant to a partner congregation in the life of the ELCA. St. Lydia’s is a young, multicultural congregation with clear commitments affirming LGBTQ+ persons and with commitments to anti-racist practices.
These markers of identity are common across the NMCs with whom this program is partnering. And it is a significant reason for their resonance with congregants who, in a majority of instances, had come to believe church just wouldn’t work for them. Much of the research on “nones”—the growing demographic who no longer claim any religious affiliation—describes the judgmental and “un-Jesuslike” actions of the church towards disenfranchised populations as a key to their own disaffection.
Often when newcomers find St. Lydia’s, it is because they—or someone they know—read Rachel Held Evans’ description of its Dinner Church service in her best-selling book, Searching for Sunday. Held Evans grew up in Tennessee, a child of Evangelical Christianity (although, she writes, her “tom-boy, no makeup” style was always at some angle to its vision of biblical womanhood). Her story is a common one in American Christianity during the last quarter century—the era of large swaths of the church joining in the culture wars. She describes how she grapples with the gap between increasingly hateful actions of her church—especially towards queer and transgender people—and the openhearted Jesus she meets in Scripture who reaches out to all, and especially to those who are disregarded by society. She finally reached a breaking point and left the church.
Eventually Held Evans found her way back through open and affirming sacramental churches that center God’s mercy, forgiveness, love, and justice. Her whole book is structured not by beliefs but by practices: practices in which she came to experience God’s presence and love. Her chapter on St. Lydia’s, in the “Communion” section of her book, is unsurprisingly titled “The Meal.” In her rediscovery of the church through “holy food, for holy people,” (the refrain proclaimed by the St. Lydia’s presider when the communion bread is broken) a wave of relief spread over her like a down comforter on a cold winter’s day. She—and everyone else (no exceptions, she discovered)—are claimed by God as beloved and welcomed around Jesus’ table. That’s the deepest hunger we have, she writes: to find that all the ways the world tells us we are not enough—not beautiful enough, not smart enough, not rich enough, not acceptable in some way, not wanted—are, in the end, wrong. All those Good Friday rejections are undone by an Easter in which the dead are made alive again. This word of grace is at the heart of compelling preaching at St. Lydia’s.
Nadia Boltz-Weber, who preached at Held Evans’ funeral after her tragic death in 2019, founded House for All Sinners and Saints (HFASS) in Denver around just such convictions. St. Lydia’s, HFASS, and other similar ELCA church plants were founded explicitly to embody ways of being church—including preaching—that diverge from traditional patterns of mainline protestant churches. While many churches across the ELCA and its partner denominations like the Episcopal Church (USA) espouse a broad welcome on their websites and in their bulletins, NMCs center, as Held Evans notes, ecclesial practices as ways to embody their theologies of radical welcome and open participation. Queering scripture, tending to anti-racism practice, and considering other pathways to a more radical welcome is crucial for the church being safe(r). This is especially true for young people, sometimes categorized as “nones” (those who often say, “I didn’t think there was a church that could work for me”).
One of the crucial spaces for such welcome and participation common across these communities, is a commitment to sharing leadership and voice in the congregation, especially regarding preaching. As part of its design, many NMCs embody versions of the same unique approach to preaching, one that both entails some form of dialogue with participants, and forms them as proclaimers of the Gospel themselves. Church of the Apostles in Seattle, a partner for this program, calls its congregant preachers “reverbers,” a nod to their deep connections to the Seattle music scene. This feature—both dialogical preaching, and practices of forming many preachers as a central part of congregational preaching practice—is a shared commitment across NMCs in part to fight against a perceived clericalism affording the pastors too much authority, and a way to honor a deep Lutheran theological value of the “priesthood of all believers.” Yet some of these congregations claim an “ancient/future” frame for their lives together, and turn to models of church far earlier than the 15th century Protestant Reformation. The early church’s preaching practice, before the transformation wrought by Roman Emperor Constantine’s centralizing of the power of the clergy, often involved many voices as the Spirit gave gifts, encouraging a vibrant communal sharing of reflection on scripture and prayer.