A church that feels like home

After attending Salem Lutheran Church in West Central Spokane for the past year, Pastor Liv Larson-Andrews contacted me to speak to the question of why I chose to attend Salem. It was easy and immediate to answer. Salem has always felt like coming home. I started my faith journey with Lutherans at Trinity Lutheran in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. And while that initiated a process of deconstruction, transformation and self-actualization, God uprooted me after a year of intensive burgeoning interest in the church and re-planted me at New Community, a non-denominational here in Spokane. A home-coming yet again in a space where I acquired the foundation of my faith and understood fundamental theological truths I hadn't bothered with before. And yet this home-coming was short-lived as well. In May of last year I was uprooted rather abruptly and painfully. As I was residing in West Central at the time, a bike ride down Broadway one day found me literally saying “Ooh, a Lutheran church!” and here I am, proud congregational member. In a familiar and yet new space that is resiliently blessed and laid out particularly for me.

The question 'Why now?' is more difficult to answer despite the deep resounding knowledge and experience of God's perfectly timed provision. For the entirety of my life has felt set apart so that I resemble Bell Hooks' statement, “At times home is nowhere. At times one only knows extreme estrangement and alienation. Then home is no longer just one place. It is locations.” I am left asking myself now that I am here in this space, what then, is home? How do we travel from the urge to be at home everywhere to Bell Hooks' “home is nowhere”? What lies beyond this impasse? A recent devotional by Dietrich Bonhoeffer assured me that “we wish that what we do or say will have ultimate significance. We hope that the structures that we create will retain their pristine influence. It is not unfortunate that they do not. Not only might the things that we make undergo change and deterioration, but they may also become irrelevant. It would be sad if we held as ultimate something that has become obsolete over time. Our structures are therefore at best transitory and need to be corrected or changed. In this, we have no abiding city here, but long for the ultimate reality in the coming kingdom of God”. While his words give no easy answers to the questions of home, they do coincide with part of my dream about what Salem Lutheran and I's time together as a community will look like.

For however long we're together, may we keep taking our giant out-of-step steps. May we keep raising our hands and arms high in order to pose our fire-breathing courageous questions. May we keep honestly conversing in order to un-freeze this world from the twin grips of fear and more fear. May we keep remembering those who went to sleep one night enslaved and rose the next day “forever free” even if they didn’t know it quite yet, those determined ones who had names, who had dreams, who held on tight to each other, who never gave up on us, their future family, that they would never get to meet, never gave up on the world being far better to others than it had ever been to them. May we alternately connect with the people occupying our present realities so that man-made structural maintenance takes a backseat to the daily striving for personal discipleship and ministry. In other words, how do we better ourselves so that we can be better to others.

On a less abstract level, may we learn how to live together in a way that knits us closer. May we learn to be intentional in each others lives so that we are celebrating when we need to be celebrating and, more importantly, offering solace and/or insight to each other before our respective troubles seem insurmountable or exponentially increased and problematic. When the inevitability of separation occurs, either short-term missing a Sunday service or longer-termed relocation, may we still hear from each other in all the ways there are to speak across and through the distances.