This month, we invited our bloggers to write a “love letter” to the church. Here are their letters.
Dear church,
You aren’t perfect, but that is also why I love you.
This is what gives me hope for the future: While we aren’t perfect, we are constantly changing, learning and growing. We are indeed Reformed and always reforming. We come from a history of exclusion, and now we are naming the sins and evils of the world and in our communities: racism, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and all the evils that people believe that support thinking they are superior to another. We are actively combating the systems of oppression in our communities that have plagued us for centuries.
I give thanks for the naming of climate change, and the horrors we have inflicted into the world trusted into our care. While there are many evils facing our world, we work to resist them. I give thanks for your resistance, and your revolution of love.
For the past year, I have prayed for resistance. I’ve lifted up prayers for the countless peoples and groups who have resisted hatred and greed. It is through these prayers that I know our work is not done. When negativity takes the headline, I dig deeper into the news to find the joy. I dig deeper to find the joy as resistance, to find the hope as resistance, to find love as resistance. God is love, and all are made in the image and likeness of that love. Church, you remind me this in the public sphere where we greet one another and serve one another in that love.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, I serve on an ecumenical clergy coalition. We are constantly joining in community events and gatherings where we learn more about gentrification, redlining, how racism continues to weave itself in the fabric of our structures and lives — yet, we are reminded of the joy that we have in one another. Where as a community in grief and joy, celebration and sadness when violence reverberates in the halls of our homes, schools, places of worship, bars and streets. It is in these moments, where our communities come together, that give me hope. For church, I believe in solidarity. I believe in unity without forsaking our uniqueness. I believe in you.
Even when you hurt me and your precious beloved children, I still have faith that we will work through the issues of our present reality. But they have been more than issues: These are people. It is more than issues; it is people’s lives.
I am thankful because we are working on being the hands and feet of Christ. We are marching, we are praying. Our marching is action, and our feet are praying with every step we take.
So we may not be in the four walls of the church building all the time, but as I see it, the ministry of the church is continuing in the streets, in the gathering places of welcome. Where there is no justice there is no peace; so as we strive to learn what justice looks like, what love in action looks like, we continue to be out in the community, we continue to be on the front lines of welcome, of protest, of marches, of legislation, of calling and writing representatives, of studying, of action.
It is this church that I am thankful to serve, to be a part of, and to continue in ministry.
With justice and joy I go.
Blessings and peace,
Joanna
JOANNA HIPP is a free-range pastor in the Presbytery of Charlotte. She is a member of the presbytery’s ministry resource committee, president of the alum board of Louisville Seminary and serves on the executive board of Charlotte Clergy Coalition for Justice.
