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The models of church we’ve been using aren’t working. Churches are shrinking, people are disconnecting, our membership is aging, and there are serious questions about our relevance in the world. It’s time for us to rethink how we do everything. By stripping us down to our mission, to the WHY rather than the HOW, can we rebuild our churches into vibrant, covenanted communities that can think outside our traditional boxes? Join Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister, and Jil Novenski, Director of Religious Education for Children and Youth at the Community Church of New York for informal, unstructured, joyful, and radically honest conversations about what's working, what's not, and how we can embrace change in times of uncertainty.
Intro
0:00:09 - (Rev. Peggy): I'm Reverend Peggy Clark, senior minister at Community Church of New York.
0:00:12 - (Jil Novenski): I'm Jil Novenski, the director of religious education.
0:00:16 - (Rev. Peggy): And we're coming to you from community church here in the heart of Manhattan in New York City.
0:00:20 - (Jil Novenski): Coming from a long line of disruption. Four fires, three name changes, two pandemics.
0:00:27 - (Rev. Peggy): We sold five of our buildings.
0:00:30 - (Jil Novenski): Yeah, that part.
0:00:31 - (Rev. Peggy): We had a vote to oust the minister.
0:00:32 - (Jil Novenski): We're in a rented church space.
0:00:34 - (Rev. Peggy): We got sued by four members.
0:00:36 - (Jil Novenski): Oh, my God. We're inviting you to join us for a Sunday to Sunday rundown of how we do things here, hoping that you find out what that might look like for you.
0:00:46 - (Rev. Peggy): We don't know what we're doing here.
0:00:48 - (Jil Novenski): We are showing up.
0:00:54 - (Rev. Peggy): So Jill isn't here, so you and I are going to chat it up.
0:01:00 - (Br. Zachary): I think it's going to be great. I'm really excited. I was doing my homework, listening to previous chats.
0:01:05 - (Rev. Peggy): Were you really?
0:01:07 - (Br. Zachary): This is really exciting. I think this is an opportunity in such a big way, and I want to lean into it. What other churches don't have is a place to hear what the leadership is actually thinking. And that transparency you talked about in the last episode is in play in the podcast. That transparency, that reculturing of authenticity, being real as ministry.
0:01:32 - (Rev. Peggy): I was thinking of that today. I was actually thinking about that podcast we did. I think we called it "Done Being Polite."
0:01:38 - (Br. Zachary): Done being polite.
0:01:39 - (Rev. Peggy): And I was thinking… I ramble on and on there, I think about my clothes, but really, what I was trying to say there was like, it's about polite society.
0:01:49 - (Br. Zachary): Absolutely.
0:01:50 - (Rev. Peggy): It's not so much about formality. Well, it is about formality, but it's also about the whole culture of kind of midtown Manhattan. Authenticity is real ministry.
0:02:01 - (Br. Zachary): It absolutely is. And in this neighborhood, what you wear says a lot about what you're trying to do and shape, you know, the way that we engage with our performative identities.
0:02:12 - (Rev. Peggy): I agree. So, in terms of, like, disrupting church, the whole idea that you work here is disruptive. It's a thing. It's huge just to say it. So you're a Catholic priest, a Franciscan brother.
0:02:27 - (Br. Zachary): Yes.
0:02:28 - (Rev. Peggy): And yet you are our chaplain. You're one of our three person ministry team.
0:02:34 - (Br. Zachary): Yes.
0:02:35 - (Rev. Peggy): And when I had this idea, almost nobody understood what I was getting at.
0:02:43 - (Br. Zachary): I totally relate.
0:02:45 - (Rev. Peggy): I'm sure I would love to actually hear your thoughts on why I was even looking for someone like you. But it feels like we have these models for hiring and these expectations for hiring and titles for things. And then from our very specific Unitarian Universalist world, we fit people into positions. And I have really, since I started here, because of the culture of the church and because we're in midtown Manhattan, I have felt like, what if we don't do that? What if we think about it really differently?
0:03:21 - (Rev. Peggy): So I can't even remember. So you've been here, like, a year and a half?
0:03:26 - (Br. Zachary): Yeah, I started last August.
0:03:28 - (Rev. Peggy): So for the people in our listening audience… Tell us something about yourself.
0:03:35 - (Br. Zachary): Well, I'm originally from New Mexico, and I came to New York not pursuing ministry, but pursuing music. When I got here, I realized that the culture of the music industry was really damaging for who I was as a person. I felt used, I felt undermined, and I felt like it was too difficult for me to try to make a life. And what I was looking for was more of a simple acceptance. That brought me to ministry, and the pandemic brought me to the Franciscan order.
0:04:10 - (Br. Zachary): A close friend of mine is actually another priest at the mission, at St. Joseph's mission church in New Jersey. That's where I'm installed. That's where I'm ordained. And he invited me during the pandemic to come and be ordained. That was his invitation. He says, do my process. Join the system, read what we have to say. I think it's who you are.
0:04:34 - (Rev. Peggy): But just to be clear, you have always been Catholic.
0:04:39 - (Br. Zachary): No, I haven't.
0:04:39 - (Rev. Peggy): Okay.
0:04:41 - (Br. Zachary): My father is Catholic, and my mother probably identifies as seeking. She grew up in a variety of different religious contexts. But I've always understood my Catholic identity to be somewhat fraught. The only Church in my neighborhood in New Mexico that spoke English was a Lutheran church. So we went to the English speaking church, where the key to their identity as Lutherans was their distinction from being Catholic, their separation. So if you went to the Lutheran church, you are not a Catholic?
0:05:15 - (Br. Zachary): Well, that was very confusing for me, because my whole family is Catholic. My father's from Bergen County, New Jersey.
0:05:20 - (Rev. Peggy): I didn't know that.
0:05:22 - (Br. Zachary): Yeah, I've got Catholic family from here to North Carolina. And so for me, when I came to seminary, I came in calling myself Lutheran, as a Lutheran.
0:05:37 - (Rev. Peggy): And you went to seminary here at Union.
0:05:40 - (Br. Zachary): That's right. I went to seminary here in New York City, at Union Theological Seminary. My intention was authenticity, but what I lacked was accuracy. There was nothing about me that was Lutheran. I had no context for the Lutheran culture. I had no entry point.
0:05:58 - (Rev. Peggy): You don't strike me as Lutheran, frankly.
0:06:03 - (Br. Zachary): I never got there. And I think there was… I'm trying to find the right boundary of generosity and honesty. I don't think I was ever invited to be Lutheran, really. I didn't strike the Lutherans as very Lutheran, either. I found a home, however, at St. Joseph Mission Church. They understood what I was doing, and they understood, in particular, my deep faith. And that faith is more what I understand to be my driving reason.
0:06:33 - (Br. Zachary): That's why I'm here. That's what has brought me to this ministry. That's who I am.
0:06:36 - (Rev. Peggy): So you pursued Catholicism, and then you pursued ordination, but you pursued it in a nontraditional Catholic format. So the context is really very liberal. You're married, you have kids, correct?
0:06:51 - (Br. Zachary): My bishop, Father Joseph Stacone, comes from the old Catholic tradition, and the old Catholic tradition is an open conflict in some of the structures that the Roman Catholic Church used to withhold sacraments. In particular, one of the biggest issues of the old Catholic Church is the withholding of communion from people who don't profess to be Catholic, because communion is intended to be an expression for the world.
0:07:18 - (Br. Zachary): The way that plays out in our community at St. Joseph mission is we don't withhold ordination from people because they're married. That's a misunderstanding according to the old Catholic interpretation of tradition, it's a misunderstanding of how sacraments are intended to function. So, yes, I'm married, I have three kids, and I'm also an ordained priest.
0:07:44 - (Rev. Peggy): So when I went looking for… I was looking for a chaplain, I was looking for someone specifically for pastoral care. I'm trying to remember. Oh, I know, because we had a minister here who was doing pastoral care, and then we brought in a second minister, but that's not what he was doing. And I was kind of open to what that was going to mean and look like. And I wasn't sure we needed another minister in particular, because there were two, really, how many do you need?
0:08:14 - (Rev. Peggy): And I cast this really wide net, and while here I'm chief of staff, and I hire and fire people essentially on my own. I actually didn't do that for your position because I was nervous, sure. Because it feels to me like if I'm hiring someone to do pastoral care, it's the people you're taking care of who actually should be the ones hiring you. So it didn't make sense that I was doing this on my own, and I wasn't completely trusting that I knew what other people needed.
0:08:44 - (Rev. Peggy): So I created a search committee. And I know when I said to the search committee, I think I'm looking for someone, and it's not going to be a UU minister. I thought that they would be like, why? What are you doing? And they weren't at all. They're like, okay, cool.
0:08:56 - (Br. Zachary): Can I ask you about that? Yeah, why not a UU minister? What was your hope?
0:09:03 - (Rev. Peggy): There are a few things. One of them is that this is a multiracial congregation, and there were already two ministers, and they were both white. And I really was not interested in bringing… the ministers, if you're thinking about this hierarchically, the ministers are the people at the top, and to have another white person there just felt inappropriate for who we are.
0:09:23 - (Br. Zachary): Absolutely.
0:09:23 - (Rev. Peggy): And there just aren't that many people of color in [UU] ministry. And when I was looking, there were really very few willing to move to New York, and it didn't feel necessary. UU's do training, and some do a lot of training, and some have really great instincts for pastoral care, but it isn't necessarily the strongest impulse for UU ministers. Again, for some, it really is, but not across the board. So if my pool was already small, it felt even just, this is a community church. I'm actually really inspired by the whole model of community churches, and I know that they don't really exist in the same way anymore. But when community churches started, the idea was, let go of the divisions of denominationalism and look at your neighborhood, who's in your community, and serve them.
0:10:26 - (Rev. Peggy): And when John Haynes Holmes left the Unitarian association and joined the community ministry movement, his idea really was, this is the new world, our fragmentation. He was Christian. It was a pretty Christian congregation, that the Christian denominational system was really a reflection of our own brokenness. And that to heal that, we needed to start bringing things together, and we needed to stop talking about that which divided us, but start working together to be a single community.
0:11:02 - (Rev. Peggy): I find that really exciting. And then this church grew to be the largest in the community church movement. There were 1800 members, which is bigger than any community church has ever been. It was the second largest Unitarian church. But for me, the idea that community churches all over the country are attracting people who want nothing other than to worship with their own neighbors… Yes, I love that.
0:11:31 - (Rev. Peggy): So I don't feel we left the community church movement because it doesn't really exist on its own as a thing anymore, and rejoined the Unitarian at that point, Unitarian Universalists. But I don't think we lost the culture. I don't want us to lose the thread because it feels like there's so much potential there.
0:11:54 - (Br. Zachary): It feels like the new world.
0:11:55 - (Rev. Peggy): It does. Even though maybe the experiment as they imagined it didn't work. I still feel pretty committed to it.
0:12:03 - (Br. Zachary): I love hearing about that, and I love hearing about your intention to keep that community church thread alive. This neighborhood is in need of ministry. Our community, the Unitarian Universalists who make up our congregation are looking for those opportunities, looking for how they can serve the wider community, as am I. And so your invitation to me to come here. How many Catholic priests have an opportunity to serve a community outside of a Catholic church?
0:12:33 - (Br. Zachary): Not very many. I could not imagine a more appropriate or just a broad enough context for ministry to feel this vital. The Community Church is in a unique place to be able to be that community because of our multicultural community, because of the multicultural reality of our membership. I think the community church can be that place that looks at these boundaries between us, boundaries between churches, boundaries between people, boundaries between communities, and kind of shrugs, why, it's not worth it. Why don't you come have some food?
0:13:12 - (Br. Zachary): Why don't you come pray with us? And you can pray how you like, but we'll pray together.
0:13:17 - (Rev. Peggy): I get really annoyed on this podcast, at myself, for talking a lot about Community Church, although there's sort of no way not to because it's the context of what we're doing. But if I think about people who are listening to the podcast, it's not just about being physically located where we are. I think that when we look at the new world, when we look at churches that are disintegrating and the church movement as the foundation of American life, and we watch that fall apart. It's crumbling and dying. Whether we want to accept that or not, I really believe what's next for us if we're going to survive, we're going to continue the mission, our mission in the world. One of the things we have to do is break ourselves open.
0:14:02 - (Br. Zachary): That's right.
0:14:03 - (Rev. Peggy): And start thinking way outside. So thinking outside of Unitarian Universalism, right. We are not the only ones with this mission.
0:14:11 - (Br. Zachary): Right.
0:14:12 - (Rev. Peggy): We find you, and you're a Catholic priest. And while people may have thought, oh my, no, we definitely can't have a Catholic priest at the center of our ministry team, the reality is that your mission is our mission. We're all looking to serve people. We're all looking to put love at the center of everything. So we all are doing that.
0:14:29 - (Br. Zachary): The mission being, I think, connection, being with people, being whole people, and knowing our neighbors, being around our neighbors. That mission, to me, is a central piece that's missing in the way that we do religion in this country, everywhere, not just here in this neighborhood. One of my mentors, Roger Haight, Father Haight. Some of his work was in ecclesiology specifically. He did a lot of work on defining the church and locating the church's boundaries.
0:14:59 - (Br. Zachary): And what Father Haight noticed was that we think, in terms of theology, the difference between these churches is what they believe about stuff. But what he found in his research was that in every community, there was great diversity of what people actually believed. They might profess a creed or might profess a confession for the sake of their community. However, lived reality was far from that. Lived reality looked more like ethnic separations between communities.
0:15:34 - (Br. Zachary): Folks who spoke the same language went to the same church. Folks who looked like each other went to the same church, regardless of what they believed. And for Father hate, that was a problem. The way that we do religion ought to be more about learning than comfort. And I thought that that was a powerful thing for a Catholic priest to say. I'm thinking about our liturgy in particular, and how we have opened up a space for learning by getting rid of or leaving behind some of the old 18th century forms that aren't serving our community.
0:16:09 - (Br. Zachary): Now I'm thinking about the stories that we tell that open up space for us to interact with each other. Those are not difficult. We don't have to be Unitarians to tell stories. You don't have to believe any one thing to look at your neighbor and wonder what makes them special and what they could offer you, and more importantly, what you could offer them. What could grow out of that relationship. That feels to me not just a mission of the church, but that feels to me like a mission of people.
0:16:38 - (Rev. Peggy): It's really interesting to think about church as a place of comfort, or church as a place you learn, because if you're going to learn, you start with a curiosity and an acknowledgment of not knowing, which is uncomfortable.
0:16:53 - (Br. Zachary): Yes.
0:16:54 - (Rev. Peggy): And that's different from a place where everyone looks like you and talks like you and has the same base of understanding or a basic belief. I agree that I have never been in a church where everyone actually believed the same thing, even though that's sort of theoretically, but that has never really panned out. It's interesting that he was able to really name that and see that, and I can see it clearly.
0:17:20 - (Rev. Peggy): Well, even in Catholic churches… I was also Catholic for a while. So even in Catholic churches where everyone's professing the same thing, we're not believing the same thing.
0:17:28 - (Br. Zachary): That's right.
0:17:30 - (Rev. Peggy): So if the church is a place where you are going because you want to just feel comfortable, then there are lots of places to feel comfortable. There are lots and lots of places. You can sit in a Starbucks with your friends. You can go to a book group. There's lots of places to meet people who are like you. But what if we want to build a new world? What if we want to actually open up what we have now and do something different? Well, then we need to be with people who are different from us.
0:18:04 - (Br. Zachary): That's right.
0:18:05 - (Rev. Peggy): Not people who are like us.
0:18:06 - (Br. Zachary): The world as it is now isn't working. And we discovered that because of how much everyone is suffering.
0:18:13 - (Rev. Peggy): Right.
0:18:13 - (Br. Zachary): We need a minister for pastoral care to tend to suffering. And I will say that that was one of the biggest surprises that I discovered as I started to meet more and more of our community. More and more of our congregation, was just the volume of suffering people are dealing with. And I think that that's not unique to this community. I think that that's our world. Our people are suffering.
0:18:37 - (Rev. Peggy): Our people are suffering. And I believe a lot of people are suffering, and we do not know how to talk about it at all. And we avoid people who are being honest about their own suffering.
0:18:51 - (Br. Zachary): That's right.
0:18:52 - (Rev. Peggy): We push them to the side.
0:18:54 - (Br. Zachary): Well, and I will say that I notice some of that is also a very Protestant reality. What I love the most about the Catholic liturgy, to me, is I feel like it provides a safe container for some of that suffering. It is almost an eternal space outside of our world. When you go to mass, I don't want to speak for everyone, but for me, it feels more like I'm entering into a wholly separate reality that allows me to then reflect on my life in the world from outside of it, that I've entered into mass as a wholly separate experience.
0:19:28 - (Br. Zachary): And it's very much an emotional experience, too. I think that that is necessary and difficult to connect to, difficult to put your finger on. It's the comfort part. I recognize that learning requires this acknowledgment of not knowing. And I think that if you are suffering, there must be an acknowledgment in the suffering, that you don't have all of the information.
0:19:58 - (Rev. Peggy): Right.
0:19:58 - (Br. Zachary): Because it's this comfort question. Right.
0:20:02 - (Rev. Peggy): Sort of the relationship between should we be comforting people or should we be breaking everything open and building a new world? And you can't sort of do both, but I think we can't do both at the same time with the same people. But we do actually have to do both because people are suffering largely because the world is so imperfect. The world is so broken, and so they are suffering. So there's this immediate, what I'd call charity need, right.
0:20:32 - (Rev. Peggy): Help people right now in their suffering, in the thousand ways that they suffer, and work together to build the new world, which requires that people who are comfortable start to question their own comfort.
0:20:50 - (Br. Zachary): That's right.
0:20:51 - (Rev. Peggy): So something occurred to me while you're talking, when I was newly. So I was baptized Catholic. I was raised with atheists when my father was Catholic. My mother was Jewish, and so I was raised kind of without religion, then chose Catholicism when I was in college. And one of the things I struggled with in the Catholic mass was when, before taking communion, when we say, I am not worthy to receive you, we just only say the word and I shall be healed.
0:21:17 - (Rev. Peggy): And I was, as I understand now, probably more instinctively universalist. But at the time, I was like, how am I not worthy? And my spiritual director was like, do you actually experience yourself as being so perfect and so whole, you do not need healing? And I was like, okay, I'm in. Now I understand that. But as Unitarian Universalists, we actually don't incorporate the concept that we are in any way less than perfect. And there's something beautiful about that theologically.
0:21:51 - (Rev. Peggy): That human beings are whole and beautiful and saved and loved, and we don't need to worry about Hell, and we don't need to worry about sin in that way. But the underside of that is an arrogance and a sense of we are perfect rather than we are in process.
0:22:17 - (Br. Zachary): Absolutely. I'm thinking about churches as hospitals for the hurting, for the sick, for the broken. If you aren't hurting, if you aren't sick, if you aren't hurting, if you aren't lonely, it might be hard to understand what churches are for. And I think that if we unpack some of that expectation of comfort, that expectation that churches are nice and pretty and beautiful and good to be in and good to be around, good to look at, full of nice people who just want to do nice things and never hurt anyone.
0:22:50 - (Br. Zachary): That's a lie.
0:22:51 - (Rev. Peggy): That's an illusion.
0:22:52 - (Br. Zachary): We don't live that life. No church looks like that, and no.
0:22:56 - (Rev. Peggy): Church and no one experiences that.
0:22:57 - (Br. Zachary): No one experiences that.
0:22:58 - (Rev. Peggy): But you know what? When we don't experience it, then we're stunned.
0:23:01 - (Br. Zachary): Then we're like, what? Right.
0:23:02 - (Rev. Peggy): What happened? How could… You're not people of faith.
0:23:06 - (Br. Zachary): Yes, I am shocked. I'm thinking about this authenticity that we're trying to unpack and we're trying to uncover. And I think that part of that suffering comes from the fakeness that we present as holiness. It's not true, but we call it pretty, and so we're trying to perform this perfection. It's funny that you should mention the sort of difference between Catholic theology and Unitarian Universalist theology about whether we are whole or not. It actually just came up this last two days ago.
0:23:51 - (Br. Zachary): We were talking about the Unitarian Universalist principles and the inherent goodness of every person, and I shared in a group of Unitarian Universalists how radically different that is from my Catholic faith, which says, frankly, the opposite, that everyone starts out broken and in need of some external help, external relationship. I said that to a Zoom screen full of nods, and no one had any question. Nobody pressed me on it. Nobody was concerned with it. It was almost as if it was okay for me to believe something different than what everyone else believed in that moment.
0:24:31 - (Rev. Peggy): Well, and that's a beautiful world right there.
0:24:33 - (Br. Zachary): That's what we're trying to build. That is that beloved community. And it doesn't always go that way. Acceptance is not affirmation. We can accept someone from who they are, or we can affirm someone for who they are. And I think that affirmation is healing. Acceptance is perhaps foundationally or ethically necessary for us to live together. Affirmation is spiritual healing.
0:24:59 - (Rev. Peggy): Amen. All right, that sounds like a great way to stop.
0:25:06 - (Starling - Outro): Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Disrupt Church podcast, hosted by Reverend Peggy Clark and Jill Novinsky and produced by me, Starling Carter for the Community Church of New York. To find out more about community church, visit us online at ccny.org if you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Or better yet, send it to a friend. See you next time.