The Spirituality of Change – Teresa Chávez Sauceda

I did it again.  I went to the grocery store with half a dozen reusable cloth bags on the back seat of my car.  I didn’t think about them again until I got to the cash register with my cart full of groceries.  Habits of a lifetime are hard to change.  Every time I stand there watching the clerk bag my groceries with plastic bags I wonder what will it take to change my habit?

I’ve been a Presbyterian all my life.  Even the few years when my husband and I were first married and purposely chose another church to worship at so that his Catholic parents would not blame me for his leaving the tradition that meant so much to them, a choice he’d made well before we met, I was never fully at home anywhere else.  I will be forever thankful for the Methodist women pastors who encouraged me to listen to God’s call to ordained ministry and encouraged me to take my first seminary courses, and yet even as I took my first courses in a nearby school, I knew that if I were to be ordained it would be as a Presbyterian.  It is the tradition that nurtures my faith, it has formed my habits, and shaped the way I see myself as a Christian and the way I see the world around me.

I share all this to say I know that change is hard.  It is even harder when it involves deeply held traditions in an institution built to define and preserve a tradition.   Sit down with folks in just about any congregation in any denomination anywhere in the U.S. and they will talk about the challenge of change.  Declining membership is not the only issue.  A rapidly changing culture leaves many congregations feeling adrift, uncertain about how to respond, or if they even have the capacity to make the change.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been involved with anti-racism/anti-oppression training in my denomination.  The focus of this training is to equip people as change agents by helping them understand the systemic nature of oppression.  Along the way, we began to incorporate an approach to diversity and change within organizations known as cultural proficiency.  Both approaches are built on systems theory.

Systems theory has a strong foothold in the church.  It undergirds the practice of interim or transitional ministry.  Many pastors have found family systems theory helpful in their work and in their own personal and professional development.  I have sometimes wondered about the disconnect between the places in the church where people are talking systems theory and conflict resolution, or systems theory and church renewal and the places where people are talking systems theory to understand historic patterns of disparity and exclusion.  How do we talk about connecting with a changing, increasingly diverse society without looking at the ways in which the system itself has worked to maintain itself as a highly homogenous culture?

The answer, I think, is a spiritual and theological one, not a theoretical one.  It’s spiritual and theological because that’s who we are.  Fundamentally that’s why the church exists, so if it’s going to change, that change has to be consistent with who we are and if we don’t change, it’s because our beliefs and values ultimately do not support that change, regardless of rhetoric.

I have no doubt that the body of Christ will thrive in the 21^st century, and most observers would probably agree that if the institutions of the church we know today are to survive into the future, they will undergo tremendous change.  What this means for the people in the church, I am increasingly convinced, is a kind of conversion.  In the same way that Gustavo Gutierrez[i] described the conversion to the poor as the movement that enabled people of wealth, power and privilege to hear the gospel as liberating, empowering good news to the poor, the institutional church today needs to learn to see itself the way outsiders see us, not as we see ourselves.

I’ve shared this story many times, because it was a turning point for me.  When my youngest daughter was in middle school she and her closest friend would often trade weekends at each other’s home.  We liked Jane (not her real name) and enjoyed having her in our home.  Jane’s family did not attend church and we had one rule when any friend spent the night on a Saturday—it was not an excuse to sleep in and skip church.  Our daughter was expected to get up for church and her friend was welcome to come along.  I asked our daughter one time, how Jane felt about going to church with us.  Her answer was quick, telling me they’d talked about it.  “She doesn’t mind going to the early service, but the 11 o’clock service is scary.”  I might have expected any number of words to complete that sentence – boring, too long, dull, but scary is not a word I would have come up with.  My daughter went on to say that the music was foreign, the words in the hymnal were strange and when we had Communion her friend really felt out of place and didn’t know what to do.  I should say that the early service was an informal, contemporary service with a small praise band, no choir, no robes and stoles, etc.  While I was still fussing in my own internal dialogue about the elements of worship that were cut to keep the service to 45 minutes, my daughter’s friend was experiencing worship that made her feel welcome in the house of God.

I believe that God calls the church to be a witness to the world, not a safe haven for the chosen or a secret club for those of us who know the language, but that is exactly what we have become to many of our neighbors outside the church.  While my own engagement with these issues of change and diversity has been focused the dynamics of race and culture, that is not the only issue.  If we were simply victims of our racially divided culture the way forward to greater inclusion would not be easier, but it would be much clearer. But I believe it is also true, that not paying attention to race and culture obscures our vision and puts severe limits on our capacity to be the church God is calling us to be.

One of the greatest barriers to change is not recognizing the need to change.  The other is not recognizing how our own power and privilege create an internal culture that excludes others, even when that is not our stated intent.  In order to effect change, we have to first know ourselves, and be able to critique our own internal culture in order to even begin to see how we might change in order to welcome others who are different, whether that difference is rooted in the classic categories of diversity—race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, etc., or whether the difference is between the churched and the unchurched.

In the health care world, where I have been working as a chaplain for the last couple of years, people talk about cultural humility.  This is the recognition that each person’s culture is important to them, that no one culture is superior to others in every way, and that respect for the culture of the person receiving health care is central to be able to give that person the best care possible, hence the need for humility—it’s not my culture that defines a person’s illness, it is theirs.  When this is the starting point, there is a sense of partnership and a constructive dialogue that builds trust—there is a relationship.

Coming back to the church, when we treat the traditions of our institutions as immutable truth to be preserved at all cost, we place the container above the content—a humanly created institution above the Living Word of a living, redemptive God.   This is why I believe the answer to the question, ‘how do we become the church of the future?’ will not be found in finally coming up with the right strategy or the right program.  There is no quick fix.  The answer will be found within us, through honest examination of ourselves.  In his ground-breaking contribution to U.S. Latina/o theology, The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet,[ii] Virgilio Elizondo reflects on faith and the church from the context of his own Mexican American experience and community, a mestizo community.  In Mexican culture, a mestizo is someone with both Spanish and indigenous ancestry.  It also applies to the culture created by people who are ‘fully both and exclusively neither.’  As a person born in the U.S. to Mexican immigrant parents, he participated in another layer of mestizaje, claiming the both/and of being a proud U.S. citizen who also fully embraced his Mexican identity and heritage.  From this standpoint, he notes, when people are talking about race, or ethnicity or religious tradition, most claims for purity serve to exclude people, rather than include them in the circle of community.

Similarly, Serene Jones, writing about the relevance of the Reformed tradition for the world today on the 500^th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, notes three critical insights, all reflecting the ‘both/and’ identity of the human experience. First, as human beings we are both and at the same time, saints created in the image of God and capable of loving our neighbor as God loves us, and sinners capable of doing horrible injustice to each other.  Second, recognizing this truth, we engage in the world both as realists, understanding our human limitations and yet with great optimism and hope for the possibilities, a utopic vision, or in the words of my mother’s generation, committed to ‘doing kingdom work on earth.’  Third, and most critical for this discussion, is that the Reformed tradition reminds us that we are to be “Reformed and always reforming,”  and “calls us … to recognize that one of the greatest dangers that we confront as people of faith is turning our religion into an idol that we worship.”  When that happens, it “stops us from seeing the truth of the God who, in generous unbounded love, unceasingly reached out to us…..  Our own pretensions to religious purity can be the biggest demon we fight.”[iii]

To put it even more succinctly, it’s not about them, it’s about us.

In the five centuries since Calvin, some have focused on his clear understanding of the limitations of our humanity, our shared brokenness and our seemingly limitless capacity to sin and to be cruel to each other.  Others (and I put myself here) choose to focus on the affirmative, on the good news that we are created in the image of God, and with God’s help, capable of limitless love and compassion for our neighbor.  Jones reminds us that we need to keep both perspectives in balance, to remember both our capacity for goodness and our inherent brokenness. If we want to change the church, we have to confront our own brokenness within the church, the structures of power that create barriers to those we have wittingly and unwittingly defined as “other”.  I have no illusions about it being easy, but my own experience teaches me, this is the path to life and wholeness, to the fullness of life with God and with my neighbor.

The Rev. Teresa Chávez Sauceda, PhD serves as a chaplain with Kaiser Permanente Hospice in Martinez, CA and adjunct faculty at San Francisco Theological Seminary in mission, ministry and culture.  Teresa recently published a study guide with Presbyterian Women, Practicing God’s Radical Hospitality: Exploring Difference, Change and Leadership Through the Spiritual Discipline of Hospitality.  She lives in Vallejo, CA where she likes to putter in the garden and try out new recipes.

[i]The Peruvian priest and theologian who helped inspire the Latin American Liberation theology movement. See Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 15^th Anniversary Edition. Orbis Books, 1988.

[ii] Elizondo, Virgilio.  The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, revised edition. Meyer Books, 2000.

[iii] http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2009/07/Reformed-and-Always-Reforming-The-Affect-of-John-Calvin-500-Years-Later.aspx?p=3