I preached in my home church today.  I talked about how listening and being open to dechurched people can be really hard but it's also really important, and I drew on reflections that I had reading Mary Hammond's book.

My family and I spent last weekend visiting cousins in rural Missouri.  It was pretty neat.  It's a really different cultural setting there, and everyone was always asking me if I was married or engaged and saying that they hoped I would be soon and stuff.  I didn't make any promises.  The family reunion separated into two conversation groups, one of women and one of men, with me and my little brother, who were the youngest by at least 25 years, flitting back and forth between the two.  At one point, some of the men were talking about their churches, and so I asked them what they thought "evangelical" means.  One of them, caught somewhat off-guard, said "Well, it's about being born again and accepting Jesus Christ.  That's very important."  Another one, who had been a pastor at one point, talked about how he'd visited St. Paul's Cathedral in London and it seemed cold and more museum than church, and evangelical was like the opposite of that.  It was about reaching out to show love to others, and reaching out to God by reaching out to others and showing God's love for them.  I felt like I couldn't have said it better myself, and it was really touching to find someone who had such a similar view of evangelicalism in this small, conservative community.

Later, when I was sitting with the women, I heard one woman proudly sharing stories of her daughters and her daughter-in-law.  She talked about how one of them insisted that the Southern Baptist missionary board accept her years of preaching children's sermons as fulfilling the preaching requirement for being a missionary, which they were not initially inclined to do.  She spoke of her other daughter, who refused to read any books in high school that went against her moral code.  And she talked about her Turkish daughter-in-law, a prosecuting attorney for ICE, who refused to let liberal judges be lenient with immigration laws for Mexican immigrants.  Now, I don't believe in refusing to read books that offer opinions I disagree with, and I tend to be more sympathetic to Mexican immigrants.  At the same time, I felt myself revelling in this cousin, strong woman that she was, and in her pride in her daughters' assertion of their opinions over and against authority figures.

This reunion was deeply affirming to my sense of myself and belonging to a community that is very different than the communities I engage on a daily basis.  We may have different cultural and political opinions, but we share a lot of the same spirit, which is very encouraging to me.  It again reminds me how complicated people and communities are, and how we transcend the labels which put barriers between us.  It's important not to let those labels govern the way I think about my family or anyone else, because it creates separations that just don't exist.

I devolved into preaching a bit there.  Sorry, I guess the preacher in me hasn't quite dissipated since this morning.