Nowadays we worry about planes flying into buildings, about suicide bombers and the latest deadly virus to make headlines—and of course climate change.
But I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, when most of those things hadn’t happened yet. What haunted the dreams of my generation was nuclear war: bombs falling from the sky, each bearing a little apocalypse. In my dreams I survived the blast, which of course was worse than dying. Because what do you do after everything has been leveled?
In this particular dream we had gotten word somehow that the bombs were coming. People were lining up to get into a building that had been designated as a bomb shelter, and I was in line too, with my parents and siblings. My dad was in charge—he was the family arranger. I saw he was taking out his wallet to pay our entrance fee, as if we were all going to the theater.
It was my own reaction that surprised me. I thought, “Wait a minute. We’re getting into this shelter because we can PAY?
“What about people who can’t pay? What’s going to happen to them?”
I thought, “That’s wrong. I don’t want any part of this.”
And I just turned and walked away. I remember the gray sky, heavy with menace. I remember feeling afraid but determined. I would throw my lot in with the ones on the outside. I opened my mouth and began singing a hymn of defiance as loudly as I could.
A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing; our present help amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing!
Around a bend in the road ahead, another voice joined me, singing just as loudly. A stranger appeared, walking toward me. We met, singing, and now we were two. We were church. I felt glad. I felt at peace.
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There was a time when church was my bulwark and my help. I washed up inside a Congregational church in my early twenties when my life was indeed in flood, and it saved me.
But decades later, our churches have come to feel to me like stained-glass bomb shelters. They’re places people go to shut out the rest of the world and its dangers for a while. Inside there’s safety and belonging and the assurance of God’s love, repeated every single week. And that’s a beautiful thing. It’s an important thing. But I just can’t stop thinking: What about the people who aren’t inside? (More and more of them all the time.) What is happening to them?
The Spirit who propelled me out into the world in my dream has broken out in my waking life. She’s driving me to step away from my place of safety to begin making a way in the wilderness.
I am about to do a new thing [says our God]; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19)
And it does feel like a wilderness. There are no maps for ministers out here, nothing you could really call a guidebook. I have to depend on heart and prayer, and just keep learning as I go. But every day I find friends. It feels like church. It makes me glad.
My nuclear apolcalypse dream ended in an image of chaos. I turned my head to look back at the bomb shelter, just as a man who had been left outside began furiously kicking the windows in. So much for safety.
I had that dream 14 years ago, when I was in seminary. Today I wonder:
What is going to happen to our churches if we don’t learn to care as much about the ones “out there” as we do about the ones inside?