funerals, business meetings, and church futures

When I was ordained an elder a couple of months ago, my congregation gave me the gift of a full set of the 1976 History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I genuinely love this gift and am excited to one day make my way through all eight volumes! Yet, it’s also gotten me thinking a lot about what I want my service in this denomination—now, of course, named Community of Christ—to look like. In many ways, it’s the history of this church that drew me to it when my faith began to crumble: If it weren’t for its shared history with the church I grew up in, Community of Christ may not be as interesting to me as it is. Yet, I’ve also quipped to friends that while I’m glad to have joined Community of Christ, I don’t know that I ever would have joined the RLDS church (at least, not in the form that it took in 1976). I’ve also written repeatedly on this blog about my feelings about the relative importance of the Independence Temple compared to the Kirtland Temple for this denomination in the years to come: One is an anchor to our past, but the other points to our future.

This weekend, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what that future looks like, and it’s an unsure one. The major reason behind the sale of the Kirtland Temple was not to turn our back on the church’s past (something that I would be fervently opposed to), but in recognition of the need to make an investment in the future. Even the nearly $200 million that the sale brought in is not enough to ward off the threat of financial and demographic collapse in the decades to come. As strongly as I feel that I’ve made the right choice in joining Community of Christ, it’s a very different experience here than it is growing up in a church that continues to see growth and that has an unimaginable amount of wealth on hand for its rainy days. I’m (usually) hopeful about Community of Christ’s future—as I wrote back in March, I think we’re in a Holy Week phase as a denomination, and I have hope that there is an Easter Sunday waiting for us on the far end of that week. Yet, I can believe that and still dread the Good Friday and Holy Saturday experiences that we have yet to experience first. What does this mean as a newly-ordained member of the Community of Christ priesthood?

On Saturday afternoon, I attended a funeral for a member of my home congregation. I attended for a number of reasons—because I liked Jim, because I like his widow, because this is what you do as part of a church family—but If I can be totally honest, at least one of the reasons that I attended was to take mental notes of how our pastor organized and held the service. I am on the young end of my congregation, and I suspect that by virtue of priesthood service and pure demographics, I will end up organizing a funeral or two as part of my ministry over the next few decades. As I wrote in my journal earlier this morning, it wouldn’t surprise me if I organized more funerals than baptisms over a lifetime of ministry.

On Sunday morning, I Zoomed into a congregational business meeting that was similar in some ways. My congregation is starting to have conversations about its finances that implicitly acknowledge that there are difficult decisions to have in the decades to come. We’re smaller than we used to be, and while we have plenty of money in reserve, that won’t be the case forever. What can we afford to keep up over the next decades? The details here are thorny, and I have no interest in getting into them here—not least because I have good friends in the congregation who disagree on the specifics that were the most controversial in yesterday’s meeting. I live far away from my home congregation, and that’s led me to sometimes take a bit of distance from conversations about buildings and grounds where I don’t spend a lot of time. (In fact, the thing I was most upset about in the business meeting is when we Zoom attendees’ comments in the chat weren’t noticed for 15-30 minutes). Yet, like the funeral the day before, I couldn’t help but wonder what I could learn from this experience about my future in ministry. I can afford to keep some distance for now, but what decisions will I one day have to help make about selling churches and closing campgrounds?

Again, I believe that there’s an Easter Sunday moment waiting for our denomination on the other side of this, and I want some of my ministry to be contributing ideas to that on local and denominational levels. What new forms can our denomination—which has so, so much to offer—take on Sunday morning that we didn’t expect in the highs of the Triumphal Entry? As a researcher of the digital and a member of a mixed-faith family whose members collectively find meaning in both scripture and tarot (more on this later), I think I might have some ideas there. And yet, ministry is not just for the church that one imagines but for the church that is, and I want to be prepared to serve during the hard decisions and rough times ahead.

• macro
• Communities
• ordination
• Community of Christ
• Kirtland Temple
• Independence temple
• Holy Week