Hither by thine help I've come

Yesterday was second Easter, which means that it was the 10th liturgical anniversary of when I joined Christ Church Wellesley, the church I attended throughout college.

My first Sunday of college, in September 2012, I was too shy to call a local church for a ride, so I looked at the UMCs nearby and chose to visit the one that was closest on foot. By a very narrow margin, that was Christ Church. (I very rarely walked to church again because within a few weeks, half a dozen people had either given me a ride to/from church or had offered did.) I had no idea at the time where that walk would lead me. Christ Church was more than an order of magnitude smaller than the congregations in which I'd grown up, and it was struggling, though it took me the better part of a year to realize that. But it felt like home, and it came to feel like family.

CCUM taught me to bear weight. It taught me what it meant to live up to my mentorship vows in a church that needed me to do so. It was where I learned Taize songs, where I realized that I found more joy in teaching than in engineering, where the seeds of how I live as a queer person in the church were planted, where I became involved with the business and politics of the church and the Church, where someone first let me sing tenor in a choir, where I preached for the first time (and the second, and the third). It was where I learned what God's yes feels like.

I think of our amorphous ring of joined hands, saying the Lord's prayer together. I think of all of us clustered in the chancel, passing the elements around the table. I think of soup on Ash Wednesday, a love feast to open a conversation about the church's future, crackers and cheese in the parlor after Sunday service, and Bible study in that same room on Tuesday nights. In my memory, it's all so intimate. And I know that wasn't the full reality--I do remember the rest, too--but there's a lot of truth in the memory of intimacy. I felt known, and I felt like I knew others, and there was so much life even in death.

"Even in death" because the church did close. My senior spring, we voted to be adopted by another UMC congregation, and a month after I graduated, Christ Church became part of Carter Memorial in Needham, just a hair farther away from Olin. I so easily could have made a different decision that Sunday in 2012.

I grew at Christ Church more than I know how to say and in ways that still matter, that still fundamentally shape who I am in the church (and the Church). I saw from individuals, if not from a congregational statement, what it looked like to be affirming in the Church. I served on a committee that faced the end of the church's life and helped to lead congregational discussions about it. I was a voting member at New England Annual Conference 2016 when we passed the Act of Non-Conformity. Without those experiences, I might still be on the committee at my current church exploring the congregation's stance on affirmation; might still have stood before the congregation last month and read anonymous responses, both affirming and deeply not, to questions about LBGTQ+ inclusion, for the sake of everyone being heard without fear; might still be going back to Annual Conference this summer. But I would have been far less prepared for that work.

It is some of the most difficult work I've done, but it is mine.

My relationship to church right now is... messy. But that doesn't mean that it isn't solid. Someone asked me last summer, not for the first time, why I don't leave, and at the end of the day, it is this: I believe in God's grace and the Body before I believe in anything else. Leaving the Church is simply not on the table for me (even if some days I sort of wish it were).

Christ Church was and is an anchor for me: a story of grace, life and death, personal growth, and community. So this is me, raising my Ebenezer. May I safely arrive at home.