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Dwelling in and stumbling through “the middle” (Outlook college partnership essay)

OUTLOOK COLLEGE PARTNERSHIP AWARD RUNNER-UP ESSAY BY MCKENNA LEWELLEN

I GREW UP IN A CULTURE that placed a premium on intelligence, until it came to church. There, right practices and service rather than intellect were celebrated. The gap between theologians and congregations was too wide to bridge, so without the endorsement of a clergyperson, academics were regarded with a level of suspicion. My childhood church often engaged in service first and study second. I was 15 before I discovered that the New Testament extended beyond gospel accounts. My curiosity was piqued by Acts and by Paul’s almost unbearable wordy prose. I visited the church’s largely unused library, and from then on, I spent Sunday mornings pouring over old volumes and commentaries. I had always enjoyed church, but it was in the library’s theology books that I first fell in love with my faith tradition.

I enrolled in undergraduate studies with my eyes set on seminary studies. In the months leading up to my first semester, pastors urged me to study in the social sciences and to wait on “less practical” things like church history and the theology I so deeply loved. An underlying sentiment emerged as pastors weighed in: theology is interesting, but it cannot walk with you in pain and it cannot hold a weeping parishioner.

Wanting to heed their advice, I arrived at Rhodes College having resolved to dislike my introductory religious studies course, but as the professor, who later became my advisor, read Greek from a lecture slide, my determination melted. I declared a religious studies major. I have spent the four years since in a tug-of-war between doctrine and praxis. In that first class, and in all those that followed, I have been met with aching questions: Can I reconcile a call to serve with a deep passion for theory? Can theology really be practical?

Screen Shot 2014-10-15 at 2.27.22 PMWith each new theological encounter, I became increasingly aware of the ways these old traditions permeated the language and practices of my church upbringing. I sensed a growing tension between my faith and my studies. Rather than ask me to choose faith or intellect, my faculty invited me to dwell in the tension between the two worlds. I participated in ministry fellowships and in research projects until finally, in the seeming void between church and academy, I found an overlap in the emerging field attempting to articulate a theological response to traumatic experience.

Nearly two years into navigating the intersection of trauma and theology, I have stepped into a teaching role in local churches. I now affirm that theology can be —even must be —practical, but that in its practicality, its inextricable connection with experience marks it with a messiness we are quick to reject. Though I rejoice in having found a bridge between two worlds, I am painfully aware of the reasons we prefer to hold them separately. So far in my role as teacher, I find myself completely connected neither to the practice of church nor to the heady intellect of academics, but rather, somewhere in between, holding small pieces of both. It is certainly not the service role I envisioned five years ago as I planned to move to Memphis, nor is it a comfortable, traditional leadership role in parish life. Though I am often an outsider in both camps, I revel in the peculiar power congregations claim as they see theology’s incredible capacity to name and meet woundedness with compassion.

My education at a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)-affiliated school guided me into the awkwardness of liminality. Language of marginality has come to indicate prophetic voice, but there is something about liminality, about those bodies that dwell permanently and purposefully in the clumsy middle space, that I have come to love here. After graduation, I will attend divinity school, carrying with me the research agenda I formed under the watch of faculty members, but more importantly, I hold the experience of inviting others in the awkwardness of the overlap through teaching theology. Regardless of where my career path leads, whether into a church or a faculty teaching position, my time at Rhodes College has equipped me for a lifetime of serving alongside academics, clergy and laity.

McKenna Lewellen
McKenna Lewellen

MCKENNA LEWELLEN was a Bonner Service Scholar and Kemmons Wilson Service Scholar at Rhodes College. She is currently a student at Boston University School of Theology and pursuing ordination.

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