God For People Who Hate Church: Salem, Massachusetts

As soon as I first heard what we were going to be visiting Salem for, I knew the weekend would have to be awesome. The conference was going to have several well known speakers coming in to talk about their views on how the modern church as a whole has played a large role in driving people away, ultimately confusing those people's feelings about God.

On Friday we set up tents outside of The Gathering (refer to my February entry for background on The Gathering and Salem as a whole) to do dream interpretation and spiritual readings for the public. Unlike last time, it was actually somewhat warm out so we didn't freeze. Part of the afternoon I was on a dream team with Brandon Bower (Airdrie, AB) and Emily Phelps (Virginia), and we had several cool experiences. The first was with a young guy named Bob who was looking for a spiritual reading. After we encouraged him with words for the Lord, he revealed that he was a recovering ex-narc with a daughter that he loved very much. He left profoundly impacted at the words he received. The other interesting experience was when two Mexican women came in for spiritual readings; one spoke fairly good English, the other almost none. Since I'm in the process of learning Spanish right now, I said several small Spanish sentences at various points throughout the process. I messed up the verb conjugation when I tried to say "Running in the Holy Spirit", but they still got the message and quickly corrected me. They got something from God, I get something from them!

The evening marked the beginning of the conference. Jim Henderson of Off the Map Ministries (based in Seattle WA) was the first speaker of the weekend, and he is still one of my favorites. He spoke of the different ways that the modern church has not lived up to what Jesus intended, and some of what we can do to change that. He asked several interesting questions, one being: "What if we stopped being the most pious people and became the greatest listeners?" He spoke about how being a true listener is the most basic form of spirituality, and how spirituality isn't just an "Oh Hallelujah!" moment. Jim had us laughing a lot of the night, simply through his bluntness in showing the weaknesses of the church. However, he also offered sensible solutions. Not a lot of it was new to me, but there was some more perspective added that I definitely was able to take from it. There was one point near the end where he talked about solid proof that Jesus doesn't expect us to live every second doing something of pious importance; he pointed out that Jesus "did nothing" for the first 30 years of His life, and then "time wasted" a lot throughout His 3 years of ministry. If you look at Jesus' life, he literally tithed himself! (10% of 33 is a little over 3) Jesus is all about using ordinary people who do "almost nothing". That was a huge thing for me, as I've always feared I don't do enough.

Watching the late night movie

Shortly after Jim finished speaking, me and some of the other interns helped prepare the room for our late night movie showing. The movie was called "Lonnie Frisbee: Life & Death of a Hippie Preacher". It featured the story of a young guy who found the Lord while he was on drugs and then proceeded to create a movement in California, part of it influencing the start of the Vineyard Church. Controversy was revealed surrounding Lonnie's sexuality, so people in church leadership were mad that God would use "someone like Lonnie" so powerfully. Lonnie eventually died of HIV, and at his funeral a prominent church leader gave a eulogy which basically said Lonnie could have done so much more with his life/ministry if he had "overcome his circumstances". For those of us watching, it provoked feelings of disbelief and even a bit of anger. It brought up a good post-movie discussion about how the church has failed to reach that group of people appropriately.

Saturday had even more controversy in store. As Jim Henderson was preparing to speak again, a Gathering staff member was trying to help get video up on the screen, and somehow accidentally put up a porno video. It was fairly quickly dealt with, as pastor Phil Wyman made a public apology/declaration regarding the incident, and the staff member made his own statement of apology, saying he lent his laptop to a friend last week. The congregation took time to pray and bless the rest of the day before continuing on with Jim's presentation.

The Neo-Pagans speaking at the Gathering

The panel after lunch featured a group of Neo-Pagans from Salem. The first was Teri Calgren, Director of Witches' Education and owner of several witch shops in Salem. She was born in the Bronx NY, raised Irish Catholic. While she was taught growing up to not be discriminatory but loving to all, she had the opposite demonstrated to her by her church family. She has maintained those values she was taught, but instead has focused it into a form of witchcraft. The woman in the middle was Susan Wade, a practicing Neo-Druid. She owns a memorabilia shop in Salem's historic Pickering Wharf area. She was raised Orthodox Hebrew, and one of the first things she remembered being told as a child was that she couldn't play with non-Jewish people. As she grew older she felt more and more that there was something wrong, and finally felt she got confirmation on that when a dream told her she had yet to step into her faith. Through a series of events she eventually found Neo-Druidism and is now quite content. The last was Christa Grillo, a solitary Wiccan. She was raised Christian, but started to question it after several events. One of those was someone in church telling her "Dogs don't go to heaven" when she asked for prayer for her dying dog, and the other was her mom dying of breast cancer. Christa at first turned to atheism, but found in it there was nothing to live for and no joy. She found a book about Wicca and fell in love with it. A consistent theme for all of them was some lack of love from the church, and their dismay at how people devalue what they believe, which in turn devalues them. This really struck home to all of us listening, as at some point we've all done that to some degree. We wonder why people automatically assume all Christians are the same, and yet we do that with witches. Thought provoking.

Following the Neo-Pagan panel, Phil Wyman started an interactive workshop for all the conference attendees. Basically we were all split up into 7 different teams, and each team was responsible for coming up with a 10 minute segment of a non-traditional way to do church. Ideas flew, and I couldn't wait for Sunday morning...

The Judson Window at Salem's First Baptist Church

Saturday evening featured Jay Bakker, pastor of a church in a bar in Brooklyn, NY. He spoke more about loving people where they're at, but at the same time being firm about our own beliefs. He gave a really interesting new twist on The Fruits of the Spirit: "There's a reason Jesus chose it to be fruits of the spirit - fruit trees don't eat their own fruit!" While it may seem glaringly obvious, it's something we've really missed as the church.

Finally, Sunday morning! It truly would be one of the oddest, but one of the most fun 'church services' I've ever been a part of! One segment was philosophically influenced; two guys sang 'Plastic Jesus' (much to our great laughter) and then asked us to talk about how the church has made Jesus 'plastic'. Another segment featured us putting whatever amount of money we felt we should into an offering plate, and then once it got up front there was a surprise. The lady leading the segment merely blessed all of the money, told us to take back what we had put in and use that money to advance God's kingdom, since all of our money is His anyway! I definitely wasn't expecting that, liked that part a lot. There were several musical segments that were really unusual, one of which was several people playing djembe drums as the congregation was called to dance and shout out praises to the Lord. Finally, Phil Wyman introduced us to one of his church's practices. He brought out an inflatable globe, and explained that whoever has the ball points to the country currently on their heart and then prays for it. I really liked it, and I now want to find a globe of my own to do that with at home!

I immensely enjoyed my time in Salem. It definitely had its difficult and stressful moments, but as of late it seems like every outreach has. Tis a good thing God's bigger than all of our troubles!