The Company of Sinners
A divinely inspired institution, the church is full of ordinary people who sometimes say and do cruel, stupid things.
By Kathleen Norris | posted 4/03/2000 12:00AM
Church is other people, a worshiping community. The worship, or praise of God, does not take place only when people gather on Sunday morning, but when they gather to paint the house of an elderly shut-in, when they visit someone in the hospital or console the bereaved, when the Sunday-school kids sing Christmas carols at the nursing home. If a church has life, its "programs" are not just activity, but worship. And this is helpful, because if the Sunday-morning service falls flat, it is the other forms of worship that sustain this life. When formal worship seems less than worshipful—and it often does—if I am bored by the sheer weight of verbiage in Presbyterian worship—and I often am—I have only to look around at the other people in the pews to remind myself that we are engaged in something important, something that transcends our feeble attempts at worship, let alone my crankiness.
During the six years I lived in Manhattan following college, I was surrounded by churches but rarely went into one. But after I moved to my grandparents' small town, I began attending my grandmother's church in much the same way that I had begun inhabiting her kitchen. At first, it was an exercise in nostalgia; the place itself seemed only partly mine. And when I finally joined the church, I could pretend that I wasn't doing it for me so much as for the pastors, a clergy couple who had become good friends.
Like so many clergy in the western Plains during the mid-1980s, they had been blindsided by the onset of an extreme economic downturn. Small-town people don't like to face trouble head-on; we tend to shove unpleasantness under the rug. While this seems to make it easier for us to get along, it does not work well as a form of conflict management, particularly in hard times.
During the "farm crisis" of the 1980s, the church included in its membership both a bank president and a farmer who was being prosecuted by that bank (and eventually sent to jail) over a bankruptcy proceeding. It is enormously difficult for a small-town church to contain such serious disputes among its members; what often happens is that the pastors, as the hired help, are scapegoated, and forced out. This is a scenario that was played out in many small towns of the western Plains during the 1980s.
When the population of our county dropped 20 percent between 1980 and 1990 (other nearby counties lost a full third of their population), it was easier to focus blame on "outsider" professionals than to accept the reality of change. Institutions such as schools and churches became particularly vulnerable to turnover. In my town, one school superintendent lasted less than a year, others just a year or two.
By the early 1990s, the Lutheran church in western North Dakota had nearly 40 vacant parishes. One Lutheran pastor I know was sent to a church that had kicked out its two previous pastors, one after eleven months, the other after just nine months. On her first Sunday, she announced to the congregation, "I won't let you do that to me." She saw her ministry as helping the congregants to contend with the conflicts that had existed within their church for years and that would be likely to remain long after she had gone. She stayed for eight years.
My situation was an odd one. On the one hand, the crisis in my local congregation gave me a good excuse to put off facing my personal religious doubts. I could join the church, pretending that I was doing it mostly to support my friends, the pastors. Flannery O'Connor once said that "most people come to the church by a means that the church does not allow," and I could only agree.
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