Returning to the ECC

Returning to ECC

artwork by Julie Courtney
Excelsior, MN

We were reflecting on Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth when the email came through acknowledging the activation of my ordination in the Evangelical Covenant Church. I was attending a conference centered on African American Religious autobiographies at the time. Somewhere between a discussion of Sojourner Truth’s words to Douglass, “Is God Dead?” and the autonomous power of Ida B. Wells defending Douglass’ white wife, I saw the email notification. Someone invited the rest of us to hear   Ida B Wells’ words, “Because white people forget Christianity and good breeding when dealing with those who belong to the darker races is no justification for this dark race to do the same. I cannot see it any other way than that the truly Christian, well-bred person is always so, no matter with whom they come in contact.”

The decision to activate my Covenant ordination and suspend my ordination in the Reformed Church in American is not without complications. I do so because of my theological convictions and ecclesial roots. The ECC is home to my family’s faith; this is where I learned the Lutheran view of God’s love for the world and our invitation to vocation. It is where I learned Pietism and the nature of a connection faith rather than a confessional one. It is where I learned the power of God’s word and the importance of personal agency in loving and serving God and the world, or as Franke said it, I live “for God’s glory and neighbor’s good.” The immigrant church was founded as a Swedish community, but it has increasingly centered on the immigrant story rather than the Swedish one. This immigrant movement is where I discovered how a missional movement can be intensely local yet prayerfully global. In the end, this movement and church are where I found the living God, where I learned to read Scripture with life and hope, and where I was educated and ordained. The Covenant movement held me into maturity in Omaha, Sioux Falls, Twin Lakes, Covenant Cedars, Chicago, Arlington Heights, Excelsior, Harbert....and beyond.

The roots of Swedish Lutheran Pietism are my home. God is indeed a friend who loves us as children and sent his Son as first and foremost as a reconciler rather than primarily as a substitution. We are agents of this reconciliation who find our lives fulfilled in mission to love the least, the last, and the lost. The roots of this are found in the early stories of care for orphans at Mor i Vall; the Pietist school of liberal arts education from A.H. Franke; and in the commitment to Scripture demonstrated by Swedish Lutherans in their conventicles and the questions that emerge as Pietists cross the ocean to the USA, “How goes your walk with Jesus?” and “Where is it written?” 

 

I didn’t know how Covenant I was until I left it for a period of time. The ECC is a free church, an association of Christian communities more than a denomination; it rose out of a sermon from F. Pamp in Omaha, Nebraska citing the Psalmist, “I am a companion of all who fear thee.” This is not about theological or doctrinal agreement but about a commitment to relationship formed in the name of God in Christ by the power of the Spirit.

 

My family has had its day with the ECC. The pain of Steve's removal from the ordained community of the ECC has not yet been healed, and my decision to return to the ECC is difficult as I join a body that has inflicted wounds on loved ones. We are not alone in this pain, and the ECC is not an isolated system. Denominations are currently facing a series of conflicts, internal strife, and negotiations on what constitutes membership. The anxiety is not actually an issue with the church but is simply an extension of partisan ideology currently ripping the United States apart. The fight is currently human sexuality, but we have been here before on slavery and women’s suffrage, women’s ordination, and abortion. And once we fight over human sexuality, and make creeds and confessions of certainty, something else will arise. It is sad that the fights are often on the backs of the least, the last, and the lost; those who Jesus Christ came to defend and liberate (Luke 4). 

 

Parker Palmer said it well about higher education, and I believe it is equally true about the denomination church, when anxiety is intense in our country, higher education is the place where national anxiety finds release (paraphrased). I think this can be said of religion in the US, also.  I truly believe that anxiety pushes systems to work against their cultures in differing times and seasons, but healing will come and the goodness of one’s history and tradition will emerge in these formerly anxious systems.

In the same week that I returned to active status in the ECC, Lindsay was interviewing with a congregation affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). How is it that in less than three years, our home has engaged vocationally with the Reformed Church in America, the South Carolina Baptists, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Evangelical Covenant Church, and now the Christian Reformed Church? This ecumenical life that we live is more enlivening than perplexing. In the end, the free church roots invite an ecumenical practice and faith. Though expressions of Christianity differ from tradition to tradition, one thing roots us across these communities: belief in Jesus Christ as savior and participation in the movement of the Holy Spirit. Each community we have served, imperfect as each one may be (and as imperfect as we ourselves are), seeks to glorify God and love neighbor, even when they fall short on contemporary social questions. 

 

I am not sure how best to live amidst the tensions, the disappointments, and the pain, but by the grace of God, I am hopeful that amidst conflicted and confounding systems, I might join the spirit and ancestry of Ida B. Wells in all I do: “I cannot see it any other way than that the truly Christian, well-bred person is always so, no matter with whom they come in contact.”

 

Harbert Community Church, September 30, 2012