By Pastor Laurie Ann Kraus

For the past couple of months, it has been my privilege and a real joy to meet with five exceptional people who are in conversations about church membership with the community here at RPC. The conversations have been unusually rich, as the group’s participants have explored the wide diversity of perspectives their respective faith journeys have engendered. Like many others in our congregation, some have come into life at RPC as individuals formed by life-long family commitments to church membership, many from traditions far more restrictive socially and theologically than ours. Others have come to faith as adults, starting new in communal religious practice by their own choice, not because they were promised or raised to that
faith by their family of origin. Among all these adult faith practitioners, there are a wide range of understandings of God and God’s work in the world; a breadth of ideas and profound questions about who Jesus was, and who the Christ is, for the postmodern Christian faith community; and, along with those personal belief perspectives, a predictably wide attitude about what the Church is and how to be a part of it. Listening to them, and looking around on Sunday morning, I am newly awed at how the rpc collection of souls: members friends, and all our children, have entrusted such an important part of their spiritual and life journey to life in community. The thing is this: churches may look more or less uniform, seem in their common work and worship as if all their adherents are on the same path in the same place at the same time… but in reality, no believer looks alike…thinks alike… experiences God in the same way—even at different points on their own faith journey, let alone in their communal journey. And yet…somehow, these collections of diverse individuals, these very-different kinds of families, choose to let their individual voices be drawn into common praise and prayer….choose to let their differing commitments, political persuasions and personal styles be knit into shared work in mission and a common process of education for faith, choose to allow
their varying skills, expertise and social locations to be gathered up in varieties of volunteer efforts that manage the life of the congregation, keep its common life vibrant, and care for its hurting and isolated members. With people we barely know outside of this sanctuary, we confess our failures and disappointments. We share our fears and the concerns we have for friends and the world. We stand up and ask for what we need and expect to have it given serious attention. We donate time
we scarcely have for ourselves to projects that were not our idea, because we are trying to bear faith with our neighbors. We
are a community bound together neither by necessity nor fiat, but by faithful intention. We are a community shaped not by the
“rights” to which we are entitled; but by a sense of mutual responsibility. We don’t always get it right…but we keep trying. It
must be a gift of the Spirit!

The feast and season of Pentecost, described in the bible in Acts 2:1-11, sometimes is referred to as the birthday of the church. And often, it is presented that when the Spirit came down on the demoralized and frightened disciples of Jesus; a strong, unified, powerful movement came into being. But a careful reading of scripture, supported by a basic understanding of human history and human psychology, would tell us otherwise. It would tell us that what was born on Pentecost was a sense of community surprising because it was expressed across boundaries of language, experience and culture. The Pentecost
believers didn’t receive the Spirit and all speak in the same language…they received the Spirit, and were able to speak in their
own languages…and at the same time, understand and be understood by their neighbors and by strangers outside their
house. So, if a “Church” was born on Pentecost, and if it continues today, here at rpc and elsewhere…it is for two reasons:
first, because there is at work in the world a Spirit who empowers each of us to express our selves, and our faith journey honestly
and authentically –especially when it differs from that of our neighbor; and second, because there is at work within each of us a Spirit of hospitality that checks our quick urges toward domination and homogenization and equips us to listen to the opinion, the story, the feelings of the person sitting next to us or passing by outside our doors, even and especially when that person’s “language” is different from our own. Many, if not most church growth models teach that the only way to be successful and grow as a congregation is to hone our common ground and cause like to hew to like; but the witness of Pentecost, and the enduring belief of this small expression of the Church called RPC, is strangely, wonderfully contrary. Let’s each keep doing our small but vital part to keep it that way: speaking our own language with humility and trust; listening with love and care
while someone else does the same, and believing that when we do so, God shows up and the path of Christ is illuminated.

Thank you each for being a part of it…. Laurie