Where else do you put the slick clergy license place when you don't have a car?

It’s happened multiple times now. I visit a church, say that I’ve been formed by many different traditions and that I struggle with this push for a single identity. People come up after the service and tell me their stories of the communities that they’ve loved, fled, been pushed from, and found refuge. Heartbreak and Salvation; Stories of reconciling to God and one another.

This blog is a space for me to think about the divided Church, reconciliation and the occasional post about a beautiful and messy life filled with experiments in homemade jam and bicycles. I am privileged to visit many communities around Massachusetts, telling them stories about themselves, stories of the larger Church and the stories of Scripture we share. It is a joy. I know how privileged I am to be doing this work.

The Congregationalist preacher Horace Bushnell once spoke of “a sin so thoroughly respectable that we have lost any just impression of its deformity.” Our sins of division are so familiar that we’ve lost the sense of deformity. Our sins of division are so familiar that we’ve also lost the hopeful vision of reconciliation that is possible. My hope with this blog isn’t just to curse the scattered, fragmented, broken Body of Christ, but to recall again that magnetic, compelling vision of what is possible.

I’m trying to learn how to lead this institution. I’m trying to learn how to pace.

Thank you for joining me on this ride.

~ Laura