A Vision for the Madison Christian Community

Recently, I preached about what it was like for me to meet Doug Pagitt and encounter the emerging church for the first time. Doug was the facilitator for a clergy retreat I attended in April, 2009. Throughout the retreat he talked at length about the life and ministry of Solomon's Porch, the congregation he founded and serves in the Twin Cities. He also introduced our group of 20 and 30 something clergy to a network of friends that call themselves Emergent Village, a network of friends who came together more than 10 years ago over their interest in re-thinking religion and theology and what it meanst to be Christian and to be church in the 21st Century.


Meeting Doug at this retreat was a transfiguration experience for me - a moment in time during which I felt completely alive, simultaneously affirmed and challenged in my sense of where God is calling me to go in ministry and in life. In the 10 months that have passed since the retreat the path for ministry that began to open before me during the retreat has taken shape. The first major development along that path has been my plan to visit emerging congregations in Chicago, IL, St. Paul, MN, Denver, CO and Brooklyn, NY during my upcoming sabbatical.


Another element of this growing sense of my path in ministry is the conviction that the ongoing call to existing congregations of all shapes and sizes is to always find new and creative ways to constantly reach outside of themselves, to open their hearts, minds and church doors and go out into the world to encounter their neighbors and friends, family members and co-workers, to listen to their yearning for meaning, for community, for opportunities to make a difference in the world and to respond to this yearning in creative, innovative, respectful, invitational ways in the name of God.


After worship ended while people were leaving the sanctuary one of the founding members of the community I serve - the Madison Christian Community - took my hand in his hands and told me that my sermon reminded him of a similar experience he had 40 years ago, an encounter that led him and others to form the unique ecumenical community we now know and love. In that moment I got the strong sense that God might be calling the Madison Christian Community through its history, through this man and through me and my experiences to consider what it would be like to birth a new community; a community that would be forward thinking in today's context much the same way that the idea that birthed the Madison Christian Community was forward thinking in the 1960s.


In the 1960s, there was great interest in bringing denominations together in ecumenical partnerships and the vision of the Madison Christian Community was to build a campus of congregations of many different denominations, including Catholic. Congregations that would share building space, share ministries, share worship but also maintain their own distinct identities within their particular traditions. Twenty-four denominations came together in the initial conversation about this idea but only two denominations - the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the United Church of Christ stayed in the conversation.

What resulted from that vision is a lively, vibrant community of Lutherans and UCC'ers on the West side of Madison who share worship and ministry and a building and who rejoice in their uniqueness even as we struggle at times to hold it all together.


What a wonderful legacy it is to our founding members as we take up their mantle of visionary, forward thinking leadership. Already we are responding to God's world in love through stewardship of the environment, a vibrant gardening ministry, the many ministries we support that touch Wisconsin farmers, people in Haiti, people who are homeless in Madison and so many others. One piece that is missing is the way in which we might touch people in a creative and visionary way through worship and community. What might this outgrowth of our legacy look like as we continue to discern God's unfolding call for us in the 21st Century?

I trust that as we continue to live and grow and discern God's call that if the vision is from God and inspired by the Spirit the form and the shape will reveal itself as we continue on this journey. What I do know is that God is using my passion and deep love for this community and the Christian church along with a yearning to reach the left behind and the left out of our society with the transforming, world changing, radically inclusive love of God. What I also know is that all we have to do is stay on the journey with one another in love with open hearts and open minds and a willingness to take risks. God is inviting us to step out of our comfort zones again. God is nudging us to continue opening our hearts, minds and church doors to the world in which we now live, to listen to what it says to us and to respond in love.