Nekkid Resurrection

About five years ago I began a journey with the Mercy of God Community (www.MGC.com) an ecumenical, non-residential, religious community based in the traditions of Saint Francis and Saint Clare. I cam to this community via a friend who had been involved for several years. I was a tentative explorer, long for some other expression of my faith and ministerial identity than what I had available at the time. I showed up pretty wounded, but our little community is well versed in the art of spiritual triage. I was well tended to and companioned through a multi-year discernment and formation process on my way to taking my full vows.

We are an imperfect group, stumbling towards grace with all the awkwardness of a middle schooler at a spring dance, but we keep showing up together, following a sense of call that gets articulated through the filters of our multiple faith traditions. So yeah, this is me, Southern, queer, Baptist Franciscan.

What strikes me most when I think about MGC in relation to recent conversations I’ve been having is how much this group fits within the larger framework of the emergent church discourse, though I doubt many of my brothers are more than vaguely aware of the work that has made up that movement. But here we are, intentionally ecumenical, theologically diverse, looking for ways to live in community that hold us accountable to what our faith asks of us in how we relate to the world.

The community is just over twenty years old, and though we long for more women members, at this point is largely made of men who live in the northeast and have some history with Roman Catholicism that shapes an understanding of religious community life. We’ve got a lot of Episcopalians, various Catholics (Roman, free, etc.), a Lutheran, a Presbyterian, a United Methodist, a Baptist, and then several hybrid identities that include threads of Quakerism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Buddhist meditation. In fact, relatively few of us are denominational purists, and most have moved with some fluidity in and out of a few traditions. Some of us are over the denominational system altogether, and all of seek healing from the “scandalous divisions” in the resurrected body of Christ that is the church.

Here’s my point: what get’s included in the Emergent Church conversations (I capitalize here intentionally in order to reference a specific movement that that self identifies with that language) is only a snippet of the larger emergence of new forms of Christian community and ways of doing church in the world. Few of the (mostly retired) members of MGC would be much at home in the coffeehouse, MacBook culture of the EC, but they’ve been talking about the same stuff for decades.

Only one in our number came out of an evangelical Protestantism that looms so large as the backdrop of the EC, but we are arriving at similar spaces. I’m thankful for what I’m learning from EC friends, and am thankful for participation in a larger emergence that has multiple expressions.

Mercy abounds.