The Bush Still Burns

How Spirituality and Organizing Transformed a Pastor and Congregation

Terry Allen Moe

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781506468693
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506468709
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Terry Allen Moe came as pastor to Redeemer Lutheran, a traditional, working-class congregation in a poorer, mixed-race neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, in 1981. Five US presidents, six Portland mayors, and four Lutheran bishops later, Redeemer had been transformed into an innovative, spiritual-not-religious, member-based nonprofit called Leaven Community, and a new ELCA congregation--Salt and Light Lutheran--nested in the midst of Leaven.

This is the story of how an intertwining of spirituality and organizing transformed a pastor and congregation. Using the metaphor of paying attention to the voice of God in the burning bush (Exodus 3), Moe describes how he and the congregation turned to the burning bush of deepened spirituality coupled with hard-nosed organizing embodied in the IAF network. The process was not easy or smooth, but the pastor and people changed, and together they impacted the larger Portland community.

This is the story of listening, discerning, acting, and evaluating to address the upstream causes of pressing issues and of identifying and lifting up the public dimensions of people's pain. This is the story of prayer circles that addressed societal challenges contributing to people's private struggles. This is the story of unearthing and confronting the impacts of political decisions, overcoming the mentality that "church and politics don't mix." Sunday worship shifted to include the stories of addiction, job loss, rising energy costs, and ecological grieving from the members and their neighbors.

This book demonstrates how the power of spiritual discernment and community organizing can transform a community of faith. It's timely inspiration for congregations struggling to find their way out of decline and the immobilization caused by fear and lack of creative leadership.

Part 1

Meeting the Burning Bush

1981–1990

1

The Transformation Begins

Now Moses, tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, drove the flock into the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.1

—Exodus 3:1

Above all, trust the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of progress that it is made by passing through some stage of instability—and that it might take a very long time.2

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In June 2013, Redeemer Lutheran Church, established in May 1920, ended its life. At the same time, a new organization named Leaven, a spiritually based, community-oriented membership nonprofit—and within it, a new ELCA3 congregation, Salt and Light Lutheran Church—was born. It was necessary for Redeemer to break open for Leaven to be born. In a daring three-year campaign, which raised a million dollars to call a mission-developer pastor and a mission-developer organizer to work together, Redeemer wrestled with the angel of transformation, not knowing what was to come but realizing that continuing in the old way meant a slow and certain death.

This book is the story of how a pastor and congregation embraced a deep spirituality conjoined with community organizing in the IAF4 tradition to shift, change, let go, and ultimately be transformed. It’s the story of a traditional working-class congregation in a changed and changing neighborhood negotiating a narrow path of recovery. It’s the story of a young second-call pastor falling simultaneously into a well of Spirit and a river of organizing going back to Moses. For over thirty years, the pastor and congregation together turned to face the burning bush and yet tried to not be consumed by it. Together they confronted the postmodern Egypt of the world and embraced a spirituality to strengthen, guide, and transform them.

Furthermore, this is a much larger story. It is the story of many congregations seeking to be relevant and vital in a rapidly changing world. The world has shifted out from under our churches, and most of us have been asleep. The world is less equitable. The world teeters on the brink of its own destruction through human-caused climate disruption. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. Could the church be awakened by embracing a deeper well of spirituality linked vitally to action through community organizing? Could the tandem of prayer and organizing be appealing to those who have given up on the church, who consider it judgmental and hypocritical, all talk and no action? Could a church connecting people’s earthly values authentically in prayer and action be appealing to generations who have given up on religion?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the voice of an alternative church in the midst of a nazified church. He framed faithfulness as a way to love God and the world at the same time, to live fully in the world as it is, even as we work at making it as it could be in the vision of God. We do not live in Nazi Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. We do, however, live in a time of massive social and economic injustice, ecological devastation, and political uncertainty. How might the story of Moses’s transformation from pastor to liberator beckon the church out of its drowsiness? In a way, the transformation of Redeemer is a minor story. I pray that it might ignite a larger fire in the hearts of the faithful to live with lives all aflame.

In June 2013, Redeemer died after ninety-three years. Today, Leaven Community / Salt and Light Lutheran Church lives. The transformation continues.

January 13, 1981: Pastor Young Whippersnapper

The evening of my installation as pastor of Redeemer Lutheran in Portland, Oregon, I was getting on my robes to go into the sanctuary for the service when I heard a voice from down the hall: “Who’s that young whippersnapper in the pastor’s office?”

It was January 13, 1981. I was thirty years old. The voice, I would later learn, belonged to Vivian Richardson, a.k.a. Mrs. Richardson, a.k.a. Ms. Vivian, a.k.a. Queen Mother. Black, angry, articulate, and stubborn, she carried her thin, angular frame on the strength of defiance, garlic, and home remedies. I didn’t know it then, but I would come to understand that she was deserving of the title “African queen” as well. I would come to love her, but only after struggling to get past the prickliness and well-worn armor that had served her well through Jim Crow and into this decade. As my persona was emerging from the fjords and lefse of my Nordic culture into a broader, more complex world, I came to see and love her as she was, despite—and maybe because of—the way she pointed her bony finger in an accusatory manner at me and other whites when she talked. I came to discover, know, and accept a deeper part of myself, ugly in many ways and hidden, but not from her. It was like she held a black light up to my body, revealing the wrinkles of my whiteness and highlighting the distance between our lives while at the same time resolutely knowing and loving me in return. It was she who schooled us in Afro Sheen for our adopted son’s hair.

She was but one of many people I came to know and love from Redeemer and the community in which we lived. Together we turned to a burning bush and pondered, What can this be? Together, but not without struggle, we realized that we were falling into God and the world at the same time.

In June 2013, Redeemer died after ninety-three years. Today, Leaven Community / Salt and Light Lutheran Church lives. The transformation continues.

June 30, 2013: “Thank You, Lord”

My last Sunday at Redeemer—thirty-two years, five months, and seventeen days after my installation—Vivian was already sleeping with the ancestors. I imagined her pointing her bony finger at the rainbow faces in white robes singing to the Lamb who makes all things new. As I looked out at the congregation for the last time, I slipped myself into the back row of the choir with a microphone in my hand for the offering song. I’m not a singer by any standard, but I chose to brave a solo that day. I sang a spiritual often sung in Black churches, “Thank You, Lord”:

Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.

I just want to thank you, Lord.

Been so good. Been so good. Been so good.

I just want to thank you, Lord.

I felt like I was joining the angels around the Lamb, singing to those present and those in the beyond who had walked with me across deserts and dangerous valleys, who had come to know and love me with bonds of mutual affection, a beloved community. I was singing to Vivian. I was singing to the nearly two hundred elders I buried as their pastor. These people who once were like cardboard cutouts in the pews became full of texture and depth, breath, and blood—some more than others, some just as a glimpse in my experience, but all a great cloud of witnesses, my own parents among them, as well as our first granddaughter, Angelique, stillborn in 1994. I was singing to the dancing bones of Ezekiel’s prophecy, a community rising in hope.

Most especially, I was singing “Thank You, Lord” to the source of the awakening in my own soul, for the Spirit and community’s transformative work in my being. Not completely, not perfectly, but visibly, as if through a dim glass, I was seeing myself anew, and the congregation, once made of old wineskins, was now ready for new wine. The stories of my own transformation, the transformation of the congregation, and the ongoing transformation of the Spirit here and everywhere came together as I took my leave of Redeemer in three words: “Thank You, Lord.” I had drunk deeply of the cup of transformation at the heart of creation, at the center of love and justice, and was filled with faith, hope, and love even as I shed tears of sorrow at leaving.

The Bush Burns in Spirituality and Organizing

Between Vivian’s voice in the hallway in 1981 and my version of “Thank You, Lord” in 2013, Redeemer Lutheran turned to a burning bush that called us to a deepening, engaged spirituality and community organizing in the tradition of the IAF. Just as Moses turned aside, listened, and was called to confront the power of Egypt, Redeemer was called to confront our contemporary Egypt. We came to feel the heat. We pondered the tentacles of flame in our hearts and in our community. We wondered, Why doesn’t the bush burn up? We prayed. We organized. We faced the pharaohs of our times. We confronted the Egypt we carried in our own national and church culture.

The spirituality we embraced was in many ways very traditional. We learned from Christian mystics, ancient and modern. We prayed in Sunday liturgy and learned to pray in silence, in meditation, and in contemplation. We learned to pray with and for one another. In tandem with organizing, we fell into God and the world at the same time. Individual meetings, also called one-to-ones or relational meetings, became a spiritual practice alongside and eventually within the liturgy. Listening deeply not only to members but to our neighbors and the broader community brought new prayers. Reflection, evaluation, strategic planning, actions at city hall, and negotiations with corporate leaders led Redeemer out of itself and into the whole world God so loves.

Being a church got complicated. And it got interesting. The transformation didn’t happen overnight. Nobody saw Leaven as it came to be when Redeemer gave itself over to a new mission to build a larger and more powerful spiritual community with and alongside Redeemer. Nobody foresaw that the beginning of this new mission would be the end of Redeemer. That part came gradually. It didn’t happen in a flash of light, though the burning bush became ever clearer, having been there all along. The real miracle is not the outcome of an innovative new community with a Lutheran congregation as an integral part. The real miracle is that Redeemer turned to face the burning bush and ventured forth not knowing the future.

In a well-funded, three-and-a-half-year campaign from February 2010 until June 30, 2013, Redeemer turned itself over to a whole new entity, Leaven Community, a larger, spiritual, member-based nonprofit overarching and including a new congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Salt and Light Lutheran Church.

In June 2013, Redeemer died. Today, Leaven / Salt and Light lives. The bush still burns.

The real miracle is that Redeemer turned to face the burning bush and ventured forth not knowing the future.

For Reflection

Chapter 1 reflects on the beginning and the end of a ministry. The rest of the story is told in the following chapters.

• • Where are you and where is your faith community in terms of a beginning, a middle, and an end? What makes you say this?
• • How are you currently thinking about this stage or all these stages?

1 Exodus 3:1, Hebrew-English Tanakh, Jewish Publication Society, 1999 (hereafter JPS H-ET).

2 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Patient Trust,” in Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits, ed. Michael Harter, SJ (1993; repr., Chicago: Loyola, 2004), 102.

3 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

4 IAF, formerly Industrial Areas Foundation, is one of several community-based organizing networks rooted in Saul Alinsky’s Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in Chicago in the 1940s.

2

Burning Bush: The Fire of Spirituality and Organizing

An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed.1

—Exodus 3:2

To awaken spiritually means that we develop a new awareness of God’s energy in the world in order to discern what is needed to open the possibilities for human flourishing.2

—Diana Butler Bass

Real-world organizations not only have members, leaders, and staff; they also have organizers (acknowledged or not) whose function is to increase the active participation of members and to create the conditions in which strong new leaders emerge.3

—Richard Rothstein

Pastor Young Whippersnapper, Indeed!

As an eager young pastor, I felt immediately called to change the congregation. I had my master of divinity degree and five years of parish experience. The congregation had seen a rapid decline and clearly seemed to pin their hopes for the future on me as a young upstart pastor. It was a thin gruel for transformation. If the impulse to change was correct, my capacity to lead was totally lacking. I forged ahead. First, I sent out funeral preference forms in the newsletter to every family. I saw so much gray in the congregation, I figured they needed to prepare their funerals right away, not realizing that many were in their early sixties. I got two back, one from the chaplain at Emanuel Hospital, a dear saint and one of the first women ordained in the Lutheran Church, and one from a sweet couple who would have walked on fire for the pastor of their church. After a few years, I proposed a sanctuary redesign, shifting pews to face the east windows in a semicircle and putting an altar in the middle. In my view, this would provide for a closer community. Though the council approved the plan, members at the annual meeting resoundingly defeated the proposal; I think it was one in favor (me!) and a hundred against. Even the council members who had approved it spoke against it publicly. It was as close to a tar-and-feathering experience as I ever wanted to come. I was humiliated. I had little understanding of what had just happened.

It’s been said that the congregation is one of the most complex social and organizational systems, and I fell headlong into the pit of that reality. Clearly, I had much to learn. I certainly could have benefited from the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr, who in his first parish in 1915 wrote, “There is something ludicrous about a callow young fool like myself standing up to preach a sermon to these good folks. I talk wisely about life and know little about life’s problems. I tell them of the need for sacrifice, although most of them could tell me something about what that really means.”4

I could easily have resigned from Redeemer following this catastrophic annual meeting in January 1984. But for reasons I don’t fully understand, I stayed. Laid low. I licked my wounds. Mysteriously—and at just the right time—I was opened to a significant new life in the form of prayer and organizing. The bush was all aflame and not consumed.

It ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Susan L. Engh
• Preface
• Part 1: Meeting the Burning Bush
• Part 2: Walking on Holy Ground
• Part 3: Engaging the Egypt Within
• Part 4: Making a Way through the Wilderness
• Epilogue
• Select Bibliography
• Appendixes
• Acknowledgments
• Index