reflections on one year: one final "dear church"

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Over the years I’ve written several dear church posts to my former congregation that were reproduced on the church’s blog. This final one will remain on this site alone: Dear King’s Cross Church, Thank you.

For a long time after my departure, it was difficult for me to see you all as separate from the structures that hurt me. But you are not the same as the PCA. You are not the same as the dogmas that are too comfortable excluding and marginalizing others. Thank for for allowing me to be your pastor, and in many ways, forming me to be the person I am today.

Thank you for giving me grace to grow and make mistakes; for sharing the contours of your lives with me as they butted up against the ideals of pastoral practice. It really is the people of the church that form the pastor; not our seminary education of book knowledge.

Thank you for allowing me to celebrate with you in welcoming your children to the world. For allowing me to mourn with you in the death of a loved one or the dissolution of a relationship. You gave me practical, not merely theoretical, knowledge of how to be present. You taught me how to sit with you rather than speak to you.

Thank you for challenging me and pushing back against some of my ideas. Thank you for experimenting and exploring with me what may and may not work as we strived together to be a church pursuing growth and maturity. You taught me lessons I would never have found in a book. You confronted me with realities I would not have willingly faced if you did not bring them up in our time together. There is still so much I presently reflect on in those moments where conflicts arose, whether graciously or contentiously. Thank you for entering into those conflicts with me.

Thank you for reflecting back to me the fruits of my labors. Even now, though I only see you from a detached distance, I’m grateful that relationships and community continue. As the Spirit was able to work in our time together despite the influences and tribalism present in our church culture, I trust that she will continue to work in you that you may “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely.” That weight and sin was so close that I confess I taught out of it myself! And I pray that you’d forgive me for any way that I may have led you away from the heart of God by putting theology before love, exclusion over belonging.

In an odd way, I should also say, Thank you for letting me go. In more ways than I can say, it was (and continues to be) extremely painful. It’s difficult to describe the hurt of being cast off by a community that I loved so much, but I’ve come to realize that there are no painless partings between pastor and congregation.

As I shared in the parting blessing I shared with you on my last Sunday, I felt “forced into a story [I]you never would have written,” yet in hindsight I see how it spurred me to growth. Though the parting and the silence has been painful, it has stretched me in grace and compassion, especially for those who have also been hurt by the church. It freed me to explore contours of life and faith that are not constrained by human structures (denominational dogmas). In words that were shared with me from another one of your former pastors that has stuck with me, “[Norman,] be free. Let love drive your theology.”

One year later, I can say that love casts out fear. It has indeed been freeing to let love drive my theology.

reflections on one year: one final “dear church”

In this series