From the Table to the World — Building a Eucharistic Community with Jarrod Longbons | Episode 281

Hello! This is Church and Main, a podcast for people interested in the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. I know that in some churches, it might be once a month. In some churches, it might be even once a quarter. In some churches, especially in my tradition, it's every Sunday. What I'm talking about, of course, is communion. And wherever you gather, however many times you gather, people come during a worship service, and they take the bread and the wine, or in some churches, grape juice, and we all are part of this event. Now, we do this thinking that it's part of the worship service, and it is. It's part of the worship service we do. Wherever it's located, it's kind of in there, somewhere between the offering and the sermon. But what if communion is not simply just a part of the worship service, but is actually something that can form communities, shaping the missions that churches take part in? What if the communion or the Eucharist means that new worshiping communities can sprout in the most unusual places like bars? Back in December, my colleague and fellow podcast host, Lauren Richmond, Jr. shared a podcast with me. And the podcast had an interesting and compelling speaker. The speaker's name is Jared Laubons. He is the pastor of Peachtree Christian Church in Atlanta, and he has his own podcast called Complex Creations. And the episode that Lauren shared with me was called The Church as a Eucharistic Movement. Now, this was an address that was recorded that Jared gave at a conference. And as I said, it was compelling. The whole point was that churches in America have been developed a certain way. And that way that especially mainline churches were developed was in the voluntary association. And that has kind of been the model probably since the beginning of our country. But maybe in the last 50 years or so, that way of organizing churches is breaking down. And so, what's the alternative? Well, the answer is probably in the title of that podcast episode, The Church as a Eucharistic Movement. So, if a church can form as a Eucharistic community, what does that look like? And why is communion so important to basically everything? A little bit about our guest today. Jared Lombons is my guest. He is the sixth minister of Peachtree Christian Church. As I said, he's in Atlanta, Georgia. He and his wife, Colleen, are natives of central Illinois. Jared has an undergraduate degree in theology and homiletics from Lincoln Christian University and a master's degree in contemporary theology, focusing on theology, philosophy, and ecology. He has earned his PhD in theology from the University of Nottingham, and his research focuses on the doctrine of creation, ecology, and the church as a community of creation. And I want to add this because I think it's rather sweet and also important. He describes his wife Colleen as his partner in redemption who enchants the world. They have two daughters and a son. With all of that, let us get into this important discussion on the Eucharist in today's world with the Reverend Dr. Jared Longbonds. Jared, thanks for taking the time to chat with me this afternoon. I wanted to start off to know a little bit about you, your background, and also especially your faith background. Well, it's good to be here with you, Dennis. My name is Jared Longbonds. For those of you who don't know me, I'm a pastor in midtown Atlanta, Georgia, at a place called Peachtree Christian Church. And I came here 13 years ago from central Illinois, and that's really my homeland. And I'm a Midwestern guy through and through. I always tell people that I was raised sort of part Catholic and part another tradition, one of these many sort of revivalist traditions. And when I received the call to ministry, quite frankly, if they let Catholic priests get married, I've probably been a Catholic priest because I was in love with the beauty, the aesthetics, but also sacramentality. However, I was actually more shaped in the other church, the one of my mom's background. And ultimately, at the end of the day of my education and study, I found myself firmly within the tradition I'm a part of, the Stone Campbell movement, the Restoration movement, which I have now served all three of its main branches. I've been a part of the independent, more evangelical stream. I've been part of the Church of Christ stream, and I've been part of the Disciples of Christ, the mainline stream of it all. But it is near and dear to my heart to be part of that church and to be what I consider myself as a sort of a free church Catholic. So I still have that sacramental worldview. However, I'm in a free church setting, and I think there's a lot of gifts that this setting has. And then academically, I have a PhD in theology from the University of Nottingham, and I thought, Maybe I might be a professor of theology. Dennis, I always thought of myself as a pastor, theologian, or a scholar, priest. I thought that I would have one foot in the academy and one foot in the church. A lot of my heroes were that way, whether it's people today like N.T. Wright or Father John Baer, or it's Bonhoeffer, or it's going way back to Augustine, folks who had a real love for the church, but also a real love for the academic or the higher level teachings of theology. I thought maybe I would be serving a church in a different way, more as like a volunteer, but it turns out that my full-time office is in a church. And on the other side, sometimes I've had an opportunity to teach, sometimes I get to write, but I still consider myself a pastor theologian. So I'm not sure if that, I should probably say I have a wife and three beautiful children and a lot going on that way too. So, yeah. I'm kind of curious, since I'm also a Disciples of Christ pastor, what have you found kind of similar and different in the different streams in Church of Christ and the independent churches? Yeah, the autonomous nature of congregations is really a very similar theme. I think that the idea and appeal to Christian unity is a big theme. The centrality of the Lord's Supper is a consistent theme. The importance of baptism by immersion, it's more pronounced than the other two streams, but it's still what we do in the disciples' world. I do get the sense that the independence in the Church of Christ... Back when there was the early kind of internal divisions in our family struggle, they leaned more towards restoring the image of the New Testament, whereas the disciples part really leaned into the unity aspects or the ecumenical aspects of our tradition, which those are the two big pillars I tell people about. Those are two driving impulses. And then I think that they're all uniquely American. So they're all in each way incredibly at home within the American spirit. The American ideal, and that carries a lot of gifts and a lot of challenges. Okay. This kind of leads into the question and the reason that I'm interviewing you. And it was a colleague who you've already done an interview with, Lauren Richmond Jr., shared a podcast episode on your podcast. And it was a kind of a, well, not an essay, but a talk, a lecture on the church as a Eucharistic community. And I've always been fascinated that, one, that you use the word Eucharist instead of communion or the Lord's Supper, and I think there's a, I'm curious to find out, why the word choice, but I was fascinated of how you kind of went through this whole story of the church as voluntary association, and I think you're borrowing a lot from Ted Smith, who also was a past guest and is a professor at Candler Seminary. But how that is not—that very much has been shaped mainline churches—well, that's not working anymore. And then you kind of move towards this, how the church, it could be a Eucharistic community. So ultimately, I would love for you to explain what that is and what does that look like, but maybe to first explain why you choose the word Eucharist. Yeah, see, the talk I gave, it was at a convention called the ICOM, International Conference on Mission, and it's really largely motivated by the independent part of our Stone Campbell tradition. And so there's a lot of missionaries, church planners, and thought leaders from that realm. And I really think it's an interesting thing when we start looking at the question of why is church membership and church attendance in decline in the contemporary world? I came at this question academically for, I mean, coming at it for the last like 20 years, thinking about the philosophy of secularity and the secular vibes that exist in our culture, what that feels like, what that experience, what the experience of secularity is like. Ted Smith, a theologian, wrote the book The End of Theological Education. Added to my story of that, added to my understanding. So we would take folks like Charles Taylor, Andy Root, who makes Taylor more applicable to the church, and then add to that what Ted's working on. And he's using a lot of sociological theory to talk about not so much secularity as a philosophical tendency, but the world of church decline as a sociological phenomenon. And what he argues in that book, I think quite helpfully and beautifully done, is that what's in decline in America is not religiosity, it's not spirituality, it's not belief, it's not commitment to communities, formation, but rather it's institutional association, a voluntary association society, which sociologists explain is an invention of America. It's a social way of imagining the social world that came on the scene when America was born. In an older world, in an older time, how would people be collected in groups? Well, through the crown or through the cross, right? It's through these power structures. You didn't church shop. You didn't choose a congregation or a parish to go to. You belong to a parish. The bell tower, the steeple was in a community. And if you were in its shadow, if you could hear its bells, that's where you went. That's who you were. you belong to that parish. But in America, we decided, hey, we're going to find ways to. You know, associate based on shared and common values, voluntary association. And when that happened, Ted Smith shows this beautifully in his book, that was a crisis for the church because the church was operating in an older imaginary. But the church wrote it powerfully through the mid-20th century into a mainline situation where at some point, you know, a lot of Americans, especially if you were of a certain sociological bracket. You belong to the Kiwanis Club, you belong to Rotary, maybe you belong to that country club, and you were a Methodist because that's who you were. And if your Methodist church shut its doors, you went to another Methodist church just as a matter of course. And what Ted's arguing and what other people argue, and I think that you can argue it from that book of Bowling Alone that came out in 2000, is that we don't associate that way any longer. Since the 60s, that has been unraveling, and it's that image of church that has been unraveling, that very institutional, very voluntary way of associating. And what things have pulled at that, sure, secularity has affected it, and Charles Taylor argues that secularity itself is mostly the proliferation of options, not so much a, a world of complete and utter disbelief in the supernatural. But now we have a lot of options for what's most important to our mindset. But also the fact that we can communicate and travel. We are much more mobile than we used to be. So when you and I were coming up, you can probably imagine kids in your high school that were really maybe unique and they had their niche interest and they would yearn for their community to share the same sort of interests. And it was hard to find maybe if they had a really niche interest. Now all you have to do is get online, right? And you can be connected to people all across the world. And what that does is it sort of displaces and devalues the communities and the people right in your neighborhood in terms of like your only option. So it is that voluntary way of associating. It's the institutionality that is surrounding that that is in decline everywhere, whether it's the Qantas Club, the Rotary Club, or the Country Club, or the church. So what I've suggested is, well, what's following that social imaginary? I'm not really concerned that the church that follows Jesus is going to die. Totally, but I think all of this is going to be a great kind of culling away of people who don't have genuine faith versus those who have a more ardent faith. But is there a social imaginary on the heels of that one that the church can think about and actually make use of? Sort of make use of dishonest wealth if you're Jesus. How can you make use of things that aren't holy for the sake of the holy? And my theory that I gave in that talk, which isn't really proven by sociology or anything, and that's not my area of expertise, but my theory is that whatever comes now is much more movement-oriented and network-oriented. You know, I know my example is like, I've got three friends, one's a Methodist, or one's a mainline guy, one's a Mennonite, one's an evangelical, actually the... When I was a Catholic, I said Methodist, but we have a Mennonite evangelical and a Catholic, and the Mennonite is the mainline variety. And they're very linked in their faith. They're very linked in their purpose. But what links them is not necessarily the church tradition. It's the fact that they're all green belt movement Christians. The green belt nature, that part of their faith, that movement that they're part of as an expression of their faith, links them more closely together than they're linked to people in their own tradition. I think that there's a lot in the evangelical world where this can be seen. Evangelical churches can be non-denominational, and then they can start planting churches that look just like them, and they create a little network. And they give everyone the sense and feeling that they're a movement. They don't give institutional structures. They don't give the feeling of bureaucracy. They give the feeling, whether it's true or not, of movements and networks and something much more mobile. And there's a lot more that could be said. A lot more examples could be given. But my question to that audience, which I thought was a funny one, was, if I only knew of a theological tradition that was a movement and no one laughed... And I thought that's ironic. I'm sitting in front of a bunch of people who call themselves the Restoration Movement or the Stone Camel. We were never meant to be a denomination. We've become that because of, for the sake of communication with other churches, but we're supposed to be a movement. And really what's at the beating heart of that movement is Eucharist or Lord's Supper. And what I was arguing was for a, I'm sorry, I have to go back and unpack all of this, but I feel like I need to. I was arguing for not necessarily doing theology on the Lord's Supper that gets us trapped into transubstantiation or consubstantiation, real presence versus memory. I was arguing for a social theology of the Lord's Supper. Like, what does it mean? I used the Catholic William Cavanaugh to help me explain that. Like, when we eat and drink in honor of Christ, it means that our fates are bound together. we're really brought into a new humanity, a new community, a new family. So your success becomes my success and my failure becomes yours because of what Christ has done with us informing us in this community. So the more we eat and drink the body of Christ, the more we are consumed by the body of Christ. That social imagination, that social teaching. Touches everything. It touches the way we think about the unhoused and the way we think about those with dementia. It changes the shape and scope of ministry. And I'm suggesting that if we can let that be the center, then we can start creating churches that don't necessarily start with bylaws and four walls and boards and committees. We can start with neighborhood supper clubs and pub churches and 12-step program communities. We can start with places without brick and mortar that are driven by the meal and allow that meal to shape their ministry and find ways of speaking to this age that's no longer interested in the voluntary association. Now, I chose the word Eucharist because in my setting here at Peachtree Christian Church, we use it. The Greek word meaning Thanksgiving. We use that interchangeably with communion and Lord's Supper. I like it because it means Thanksgiving, and it's part of the Greek that's part of the liturgy. It's part of the scripture. So I think that it gives us a shared grammar with a broader Christian world. I always say that our tradition, brother, was if we had theologians at the founding of it, which we didn't, if we had theologians, then we would have used sacramental language to describe what we do at communion and baptism, which makes us ultimately the most unique non-Catholic church in America. We're not like any other non-Catholic church. And I don't say Protestant, I say non-Catholic church. And if we really had a robust language and theology, then we could more aptly speak both to Catholicism and to Protestantism. The way I read our tradition is we're not a Catholic nor Protestant, we're just Christians. I mean, I think that's what they were trying to say. And if we could live into that better, then we can be better conversation partners. So that's a lot in a very short time. Sorry. No, no, no, no. That's, that's great. How do you think, and maybe why is maybe the better question, especially the disciples, but the wider Stone Campbell movement doesn't handle Eucharist so well? Or, well, maybe the question is, are they handling it well? My answer would probably be is not so much, but I guess my question is why? I feel as though one of the problems with mainline Protestant theology is that it has become flattened, disconnected from the transcendent, and mostly focused on imminent realities. That is to say, if I look a lot at our publishers, if I look at a lot of books we're producing, we're focused on ethics and social justice. There's nothing wrong with ethics and social justice. In fact, I'm not decrying any of that. I believe that following Jesus actually has profound implications for us creating a just and equitable world or a flourishing world. However, but when you disconnect from the transcendent, when you disconnect from our pious relationship to God, our transformative connection to God, how God is breaking into our midst, it just becomes a flattened sense of duty that you're supposed to go and do these things. And so we take away beauty and we take away mystery from Eucharist and a lot of our practices, and we just reduce them down to what it means for the social order. So in a lot of disciple world, I like to call it disciple world, not a disciple world, I find churches tripping over themselves trying to make communion more meaningful. And they do so with a lot of like, I would consider them unnecessary steps. A lot of them. One of my colleagues in the ministry, we were at an event. And we were doing some things around communion. I think we were making it excessively hard. We were in a historic place. We didn't receive by intinction from a patent and a chalice. We walked up and out of a big chalice, we took those little individual cups. I have some here for when I go visit people. And I was like, why are we doing it this way? It almost devalues it in the setting. But we also had to go to stations and we had to do something craft or artistically inclined. And I said something to him and he goes, I hate arts and crafts worship. This is what he called it. And I keep thinking to myself, you don't actually have to do stuff to elevate it. It in and of itself is very elevated. In my setting, we're grateful to have a beautiful altar, which we do call an altar, not just a table, but an altar. And when you say the words of institution, you lift up the elements. You actually put the reverence into it. It's incredibly dramatic. You actually don't have to do stuff to make it more dramatic. And sometimes, sometimes, not every occasion, I'm not that harsh, but sometimes kind of makes it a little less, well, it's a little hard to take seriously. It's a little campy, a little kitschy sometimes. So I think that happens a lot. I mean, and you, I think it's always a danger. And in the world of preaching, I call it prophetic-only preaching. So when we flatten everything down to what we're supposed to do in the imminent, we forget the fact that we're not just called to go and do things differently in the world. We're called to have an encounter with God to be completely transformed. So we can't divorce the transcendent from the imminent, right? And so if we're always, always, always telling people, well, you're not doing this good enough. You got to go do this. You got to do this. The world's still broken. I think we run people down, right? And then we find that the church is a less effective, benevolent society than many social work organizations and many other organizations that can cause real change in the world, and it makes the community less impactful. We're not just a prophetic community. We are. We are. But we're also a community of priests, right? We're pastors. And so, we need to be finding our personal relationship to Jesus. And in so doing, we find our way of relating, new ways of relating in our relationship to the people around us, and also systems, right? Justice follows that. So, my point is not to diminish social justice or flattening out of our social thing, but it's to connect them back again to the transcendent source. It flows from the other. Yeah, I mean, I think growing up, I grew up in Michigan and went to half of my education was in Catholic schools. And so, part of that was, of course, having Mass. And I was always fascinated by how they did communion. Yeah. I also realized in high school that I was taking communion and that was actually a no-no and didn't know that until years later. But no one stopped me. Right. They didn't police you. Yeah. But there was a kind of a mystery to it. And I think what was also fascinating, another story is that when I went to seminary, I went to a Lutheran seminary, and again, there was a certain mystery that said that this was something, not just something that you did, but it was really a connection with God in a way, and that there was a kind of a mystery that I think sometimes in Protestant traditions, as you have said, we've flattened it so that it doesn't leave room for that mystery. Yeah, I remember when I was trying, I did my PhD in the UK, and people are like, well, what tradition are you from? And in that time, I was serving in the Church of Christ, And I remember having a hard time. I'm like, look, it's basically, it's a uniquely American church. I always tell people we're the first American indigenous Christianity. But I'm like, you would think of us as like evangelicals, what I said. I said, we're sacramental about baptism, because specifically in the Church of Christ, there's like, this is the moment where it happens, right? So we're sacramental about that. We're not so much sacramental about the Lord's Supper, but you better darn well take it every week, right? And and I that was a little joke I would kind of say with some friends who were in the know um. But the reality is, it was in that former community, that Church of Christ that I served, where this idea started taking practical root. I was in the midst of serving. We had a young adult ministry that would meet in my home every Sunday night, and we'd have 50 to 80 people. I mean, we had 100 people on the roster, but 50 to 80 people come to my house. And eventually, someone in the church gave us a house between two universities, two U's. We used it for clothing drives, art shows, living room concerts, and a Sunday gathering. They always did a big meal. The meal was a potluck. And we'd have significant theological and biblical study conversation. And at the very end, we always gather around the table with like a decanter of wine and a loaf of bread. People were instructed to get whatever drink they could. And we'd gather around. And now everything from the meal to the study culminated in us celebrating Eucharist or communion or the Lord's Supper together. And part of the liturgy, very often, or part of the reflection, very often was these words of William Kavanaugh, where he wrote this in his little book on economics, being consumed, economics, and Christian desire. He's reflecting on John 6, whoever eats and drinks my body, whoever eats my body and drinks my blood, I abide in them and they abide in me. He just keeps saying that. The more you consume the body of Christ, the more you are consumed into the body of Christ, such that our fates are bound together. And so now you're with all these young adults, you're looking around around 50 to 80 people, you're looking each other in the eye and say, because of what Jesus has done, we get to be a new people. Because of what Jesus has done, no matter what your intellectual background is, or what your political background is, or your color is, or all these different things that we are brought into a new form of community, right? And our fates, like it's so solidarity rich, our fates are bound together. My success becomes yours and your failure becomes mine. I mean, this is stuff that flies in the face of the American impulse, right? It's Ubuntu almost, right? Like I am because or because of me, right? Like it's very, there's a resonance to that language and that tradition. And then we would eat and drink and honor Christ and we'd raise our glass, right? And we'd eat and drink and honor of Christ. And that transformed those people's lives, that transformed that community. People grew deep in their faith, but they also grew deep in their connection to one another. And that, from there, people would go out and do good in the world. And I've applied that idea. Here in Peachtree. So we feed the unhoused on Monday mornings, but we call it taking an altar into the world, right? Taking the table out into the world. It is Eucharistic is the imagination for it, right? We have a respite ministry on Tuesdays and Thursdays for people who happen to have cognitive decline. Their loved ones can drop them off between 10 and 3. There's a meal, there's devotion, but there's all these cognitive enhancement games or memory games. There's this way of being together. The volunteers are participants just as much as the participants. There's a one-to-one ratio. And we hold the memories and we hold the faith of the people who can no longer recall their memories and recall their faith because our fates are bound together. You see, what do you do for the person with dementia in your congregation who can no longer remember Jesus Christ, right? And it goes through the words. We hold it for them. We hold each other's memories. This is inspired by the theologian John Swinton. But having that as your social imagination, what does that mean to be a Eucharistic? It means these things, and it applies to racial reconciliation language, and it applies to economic disparity, and it applies to immigration, and it applies to everything we touch. So when we go back to the nature of the church, and we're talking about historical churches like my own, we're not going to become a neighborhood church that's having a meal. Like letting that social teaching of the Eucharist drive the ministry, it starts to take shape and change things about every aspect of your ministry in the most life-giving a ways. It becomes movement feeling. It dusts off the old cobwebs of institutionalism and makes it more vibrant. And then for newer church plants, I'm suggesting that we don't need to be planting tons of churches that look like the church down the road. We can be nimble, creative, and create little Eucharistic gathering spaces that may grow, they may need to build a building at some point or they may not. They may just be these networks that meet. And there's a lot of examples of those things that actually happen. So nothing really new. This all stuff happens. The more we continue, the more it looks like we look like the book of Acts, if we take this seriously. Well, and it's funny because one of the – we're doing this on the fourth Sunday of Easter. One of the passages in the lectionary this week is from Acts 2, 42 through 47. That's the famous verse about the early church and what they were like. Right, yeah. And that is the playbook for the Restoration Movement, right? So when I think about a Eucharistic, the church being a Eucharistic movement, that's what I'm thinking. It's an altar that – there's a beautiful language from Henry Nowen in one of his texts. It's like, we are called, broken, blessed, and I can't remember the breakdown, right? But we are called, we are blessed, we are broken, and we are sent and given back out. Like this is the nature of the church. We have this altar or table. Disciples love the word table. We are called to it and then we're sent from it. Yeah. All too often, I think we talk a good game about being a community that is accepting and tolerant and open. I think the mistake disciples make is that we value tolerance as a virtue, and it's not a virtue. And the way it plays out when I'm talking to colleagues is they'd like to describe us as, you know, disciples' identity is big tent. And that really is dissatisfying to me. the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if the number one characteristic about you is that you're big tent, then you are nothing. Then you really are nothing. You're just kind of a gaping hole. If it's like a side quality, if it's like a wing of your personality, well, now we got something. And it is a wing personality. And that wing aspect, that secondary quality, shouldn't be called a big tent for the disciples. She should be called open table. Open tables, that's what that means. We welcome all Christians. But that's not that unique. I mean, other churches do. What's unique is we're a non-Catholic, we're a non-Roman Catholic community that is driven by gathering around the table. Every time we gather, we're committed to these things. We're committed to the most fundamental practice. So before dogma and doctrine, It's a practice that we're driven by. When people make a confession, we baptize them, and then they're people of the table. Now, if we really take seriously what that means socially, it changes everything. It makes us more pious and spiritual and have that evangelical slash Catholic deep connection. Evangelical, it's more pious. Catholic, it's a more sacramental connection to God, the street. Like a lot of main focus people, it changes the way we relate to the world and gives us a justice orientation. So it doesn't miss any of it, I don't think. I think it speaks to it all. This kind of leads to a question about kind of the social implications of the table or altar, because you talked a few times about the act of the Eucharist being that our fates are bound together. Now, of course, we live in a pretty polarized time where to say people don't like each other, that's putting it lightly or mildly. And last year I talked to a friend of mine, a colleague who is a Methodist pastor, Drew McIntyre, he's a pastor in North Carolina, and he talked about the importance of communion being a place where you can bring people of differing opinions and beliefs together. And it feels like that's—especially right now, outside of the walls of the church, but sometimes in the walls of the church—there can be a lot of friction, and people don't want to talk to each other. So, how can the Eucharist help in some ways to bridge this gap? So I think that sometimes we fall into a. Dichotomous way of thinking about what we do in church, right? On the one hand, there's the practice of the liturgy, and on the other hand, there is the teaching about what we're doing in liturgy. And I think they have to go hand in hand. So I don't think you can just do it, do it, do it. We keep celebrating the Lord's Supper or communion or Eucharist, if you will, and think people are going to get it. I think you have to be taught it as well, and I have to be back and forth together at the same time. So it's never somewhere we arrive at. We're always on the journey there. This is our part of our pilgrimage as a people. We're moving towards greater levels of flourishing and unity. And so it's going to be messy along the way, but we have to show and we have to do. We have to do and we have to show. Last night I was invited, by the way, Ted Smith invited me last night with a few other colleagues in the disciples to help participate in initiative that Candler's doing called the La Mesa Theological Institute. La Mesa is stable. And it is an organization, a part of Candler is doing this incredible work to help, it's a, it's a, It's a certificate-granting program that's really aimed at Spanish-speaking people, Korean-speaking people, and people from traditions that don't necessarily think the next step to ministry is an MDiv. So a lot of charismatics and different traditions that don't have an MDiv impulse. And maybe even large churches that hire from within, people who don't have theological education, they can go to La Mesa, and it's an intentional curriculum. Curriculum and it's an intentional social structure which puts you into these, you know, basically multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic groups of people to study. At the end of it, you get a certificate that is completely and utterly accredited and can be transferred into any MDiv program in the country. So if they want to continue on, they can go on. It's an incredibly cool program. And Ted thinks that the disciples share a lot in common with this, and he's really interested in getting the disciples connected to it. So I went to this dinner and it was like, They talk about La Mesa, the table. They talk about the family, and they talk about how in these cohorts, they accept everybody who's Christian. So they have affirming, LGBTQIA plus affirming people, and they have people who don't affirm any of it, people who think it's a sin, right? And they're in the same cohort. And they have people who are progressive theologically in other ways, people who maybe question miracles in the Bible, people who think every word's inerrant. And they have Republicans and they have, and they talk about how in their cohorts, they've had some, they really embrace holy disagreement. And they really embrace like even the challenge and conflict and even the non-resolution, like where no one is compromising, like they talk about that. And I looked at students in the face as they were talking and people were all nodding their heads and very excited. And I could tell it was also hard work. So our regional minister, Reverend Dr. Adam Harmon was there and he looked at me and he goes, I think sometimes our people like to think we're like this, but we're not. Yeah, we say the words and then we still find ways to be with the people who sound and look like us. So I think we had a little holy envy in that moment, and it's also a call to continue being who we are. So if we're going to be that, we have to work for it. And I would like to say to our general church and the world of disciples, I really do see when we're all together, we're not really that interested in hearing from the more conservative traditional voices in communities. Those are the ones that are excluded, right? And I get it. It's just easier to do if we're welcoming other voices. So like you said, it's really hard. It's really hard. I remember the first time I met Ted though, because he ministered to me when he was first meeting me. And I said, my congregation has people who are MAGA and they have Bernie Sanders supporters. And I got people who think being gay is wrong. And I got people who are gay. And I've got people from all over the country and Catholics who marry Baptists and they found a home, people born disciple, people who have been in cults and come out, all is different. And I said, and I just said, so hard. It's so hard to keep it together. And then he just sat quietly and, And he goes, well, what a beautiful privilege it is to try to keep it together. And when he said that, it spoke a word of blessing to me because I was sort of not excited that I was in that setting. But then I realized how holy of a calling it was to try to be. And not to just gloss over a difference, but to try to hold those tensions in unity. It's real tough. But more often than not, my people come to church not wanting to hear what I think about every political issue. I pick and choose my battles or my shots. Most of them are going through divorce or a cancer diagnosis or want to know what it means to have meaning and value in a world where algorithms and AI is taking over. And most of them are living lives where they can't catch a break, can't catch a breath. Want to know what it means to follow Jesus as a single man after their wife has died in their 40s. I mean, they're just looking to connect with God. You know so i gotta pastor them too in in other ways than just telling them how to vote or what to think about the news sorry probably a tangent no it's not a tangent i think that is, important to hear today because. Too often we're we're it's easy to kind of remain in our little worlds and and i think especially Especially in the day of social media, we can remain in our little world and think of the other person as just kind of this…. Very thin person that we, yeah, it's the other, and we don't really know who they are. And I think the beauty of the gathered community, the beauty of communion, is that that other person isn't just other, they are someone made in the image of God. And that can be challenging to hear that, especially if that's someone who doesn't agree with you. Last summer or spring or whenever it was there was a festival of homiletics here in atlanta, and i went i went to go hear uh someone i look up to called dr cynthia hale pastor in our denomination here in town she's a friend of mine and and i wouldn't have gone otherwise i didn't know it was happening and then i saw she was speaking i thought well i better go see here and hear her and i got to hear from otis moss jr uh and he gave a sermon that was really powerful And then he gave a, like a lecture and the lecture, he said, he, you know, he said, I love basketball. And he goes, if you know, basketball, you can only dribble with your right hand. You can, you can only go to the right side. Right. And you can, you can only do layups on the right side. You got to have the left hand to dribble. So you can go to the other side. And he's like, he goes, that's what, that's what the church is like. He's like, he's like, we need to have both hands so we can defeat the enemy. He goes, we need to have in the way he spoke about it was, we need to be able to talk about Karl Barth and our evangelical theology. At the same time, we need to switch over to James Cohn and talk about our social justice theology. Those were the examples he gave. But when he said that, I was like, thank God. I wish someone would tell my own people that. It's not just one, and they're not mutually exclusive. It's like these things that the church is... There's probably a reason why we have so many traditions and denominations, because not one of them can speak to the fullness of God. So we're all trying. And we all have something to say to each other. Our tradition should know that. So... You talked a little bit about how the communion and the table have kind of, or in your words, bringing the altar out into the world, and you've talked about that with the unhoused or people who have cognitive issues. How do you think that communities can in some way be driven by the Eucharist into the world? So just because I like to sign my sources, Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a book called An Altar in the World. So I didn't like to make that up. You know, I think that something that a lot of churches can do is take a lot of the grass that they just mow, the properties that they just exist. I mean, we're in a city here in Atlanta, so we don't have a lot of that. But I've seen thousands of churches that just have grass. They just mow. They don't do anything with it. But I think it'd be incredible to start gardening in agrarian ministries, right? Turn it into food production sites. And that last congregation that I served, it was in the middle of a farm, like near, it was on good soil near the farmland. And it was incredible to take that Eucharistic understanding of the world, that God gives us things, we bless the things, and we lift them back to God as God is the end goal of all things. That's what priests do. Priests take the collection of the earth and they offer it to God, even if the priest is going to consume it. And in the Old Testament, many of the sacrifices were consumed by the priestly class, right? Or the people. But that's the job of a priest. A priest is one who turns the world back to God and then mediates God to the world and, As a good Eucharistic people, we are priests. We are priests of all creation. So what if we took our land and we started growing food for those who have needs for food? What if we started blessing the land and taking care of it in healthy ways? What if we started bringing in the harvest and bringing it to the altar and blessing it before it was given out to people in need? What if we fueled many of our fellowship meals by the very food that we cultivated, grew, or caught, or raised, right? What if this was part of it? Now, all of a sudden, your church tied to Eucharist has an incredibly eco-friendly ministry, right? Which can also then touch people who are in food insecurity. If your land was producing food for people in food insecurity, what if churches were buying up dilapidated properties in the inner city and cultivating them into true public places that we're producing food. I mean, that is a Eucharist mindset, right? Because it is a drawing together of folks around a table that is blessed and given in faithfulness. So these are some just, They're not new ideas, Dennis. I've been thinking about these things and working on them for years, and some of these are dreams I haven't yet to achieve. But that's an example, just as much as opening our doors every Monday and feeding the unhoused on the steps of the church. We bring them into the church, right? But on nice days, we take all the food out, and it's really lovely. And people in the neighborhood can see and participate. Tuesdays and Thursdays, we do our unhoused in the same way. But right now, we're launching more and more small groups than ever at Peachtree. And the small groups are supposed to gather to not only do a Bible study or prayer, but it's anchored by Eucharist, and they're given a liturgy to say. And my thinking is the more you get like three, four to 12 people in these little gatherings, whether at a restaurant or in a home or in an office space, once they're doing that, and people can see what they're doing, right? It's a witness, but it becomes this little solidarity thing where we look each other regularly in the eye and talk about what Jesus has done to make us a new community and how our fates are bound together. That actually excites people to come back on Sunday to join the wider community. It gives energy to that. It doesn't splinter us off from each other. right? I think William Kavanaugh also says it in this book, the Being Consumed book, that the way to be more connected to the universal church is to be more deeply invested in one local church. There's churches, it's a mystical, because the church is mystical, it's not just a sociological reality. But I've met those people like you have that say, I don't belong to one church, I go to four or five because I want to be connected to the big... No, no, the way to really be connected to the church universal across time and space is to be more devoted to one, Because the more deeply you go in relationship with another human being, the more deeply you're connected to God and God's own self, I think. This all sounds like a book that's going to come out at some point. Well, I don't know. I would love to get a publisher to want to publish that. But, you know, I got a couple things that I've been writing. And I have talked to a publisher connected to us who very briefly over email thought this was too academic and one of a more popular level. But I see it as being academic and showing how the voluntary association and all that stuff's coming about. But then the rest of it, I think, is taking the social teaching and then putting practical stuff to it. I would love to put this out. For me, this is the best way for renewal for our denomination. I think so. Every time I hear about the renewal stuff, I'm always a little left one thing. Now, I really love Terry Horton's new work on staying at the table. I think it's a lot of important stuff that she's wanting to talk about. I think we should take it seriously. I think we should take it seriously. And Terry is one who I've spoken with who has, you know, been very – she's got a theological, political point of view, but she doesn't want to exclude anybody, even people who disagree. And I know that to be true about her, and I think that's admirable. One of the questions I wanted to ask you kind of as we wrap up is about Eucharist, especially in specific situations. Of course, I'm recording this from the Twin Cities, I pastor a church in St. Paul, I live in Minneapolis. Obviously everyone knows what happened here this past winter. And I think, how does the Eucharist speak to that? What does the Eucharist have to say? And this could be in other communities that are dealing with other things, but how does. Work as we go out into the world after coming together in communion. I don't know that I have a great answer, but here's the one right off the hip. You mentioned lectionary, and last week's lectionary reading in the gospel was the Emmaus story, right? Yeah. The one thing that I think is so beautiful about it is these two disciples are walking from Jerusalem toward Emmaus and Jesus starts walking with them. He's almost like an interloper. They don't know who he is so he's a third person listening in. He asks them, what's gone on in Jerusalem? And they basically say, well, you've been living under a rock? My daughter goes, no, he was living behind a rock. She told me that. So they tell him their story. And I was compelled to tell the congregation Sunday that that made Jesus happy because it made them witnesses. And Jesus wants us to be witnesses. I said, Jesus wants the church to be witnesses, not brand managers, right? Not influencers, right? And so he wants witnesses. And they did that. And then he says, well, now he called him a fool, which is not nice. But then he goes, don't you know, this was talked about. And he opens the Bible for them from what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, the First Testament, whatever. Moses and the prophets, and he shows them how it's about Jesus. And so what's this? This is theology. Theology being unpacked on the road as you go, right? But it's not quick. It's not a quick fix. This isn't simple understanding. This isn't saying, and pardon me, all this is from the sermon I preach. But he said, I told a story about how a young man I know never read Moby Dick, and he put it in chat with GBT, so he thought he understood did it? ChatGPT gave the themes and the storyline. And I'm like, oh dear, you don't know Moby Dick. Because it's not about having fast facts to memorize. It's supposed to do something to you to go through the experience of reading the narrative. So theology is done on the road. We process it as we go through life. We don't arrive. So it happens in hard moments like what happened in your cities. But it's also savored. It's something that we spend time with. We don't just have fast facts or always easy answers or even the answer at all. Sometimes it's something we're sitting with. And then- They think he's going to wander off, and they call him back and say, no, no, no, our hearts have been burning on fire with you, with your teaching. We want more, please. And so they go sit down for a meal, and when he breaks the bread, that's when they recognize who he is. And it's over the shared meal that the connection has had. It's now savoring the meal together when they have the insights. And to me, this is the theology comes out of the table, and it's on the road. It's never in a place of having a rhyme. And so it's in the mess. What does it mean for a place like St. Paul and Minneapolis? I'm not 100%. Maybe the church showing up in ways without all the easy answers, in the mess, but also with a Eucharistic meal, bearing one another, or the implications of the Eucharist, like your success is my success, my failure is your failure. I mean, entering into this in solidarity of the pain of the suffering. And what would it mean also to enter into with some solidarity entering into the vile acts, right, with the persons who made these egregious mistakes or heinous acts, whatever you want to, like, what does it mean to even like withhold righteous indignation for the sake of the awkwardness of realizing that this is such a mess? How am I still standing with somebody? Or how am I going to pastor them now when they have messed up royally, right? I hope that, see, I feel like I'm going to get canceled for even saying that, right? That's the weird world we live in. Like, you have to come down with the righteous indignation. I was a friend with a pastor who's one of our elders who's gone since been with the Lord, who is a very faithful man. He said that that man, the wealthy man, the faithful man who's passed, was a very wealthy man, came to this pastor and told him one day that there's a man sitting in a New York jail, the loneliest man in all the world, and he needs a pastor. And so he flew him there because it turned out that my pastor friend was the pastor of the man who killed John Lennon back in the early 80s, right? And everyone else, even the pastor's impulse was to distance themselves. Where this man comes and goes, no, I mean, this guy needs somebody. What does it mean to go sit with him? You know, to go sit with somebody. You know, I think the Eucharist kind of drives us to those awkward places. It's not always a happy table. I don't know if that makes any sense, Dennis. I think it does. I don't know that I have every answer. Well, I don't think I have a satisfying answer because I don't. Yeah. It's to live in these moments of difficulty. Someone taught me a long time ago that we make fun of Job's friends because they give all the wrong theological answers. I think it came from Hauerwas probably first, but the idea is that they sat with Job for like a week, and that's sometimes it. So any Sunday, I know I gather, I'm sitting with sinners and saints. I'm sitting with the victims and the victimizers, probably all in one space. I'm sitting with people. It doesn't mean to sit together, to savor the teachings, to let them burn in our hearts, to grow as we go. It's a journey. Yeah, I think the... There isn't an easy story or even a happily ever after story. There's just kind of a lot of sometimes tension. And sometimes you have to sit in that tension and to sit with people. And how, in a way, God sends us into situations where that are tension-filled. It's Peter being sent to talk to Cornelius and all of that. Right. Yeah. Well, if people want to connect with you, how can they do that? Well, I mean, I need to build the website that I'm... But peachtree.org is my church, and you can email me, and there's a lot of my sermons and stuff on there. We're starting a YouTube channel. I mean, we have a YouTube channel for the church, but I'm starting a YouTube show where I answer theological questions from the congregation and from the internet. But I'm on social media and Instagram, Facebook, really. I got off X a long time ago for my mental health and well-being. But just email me. And these are projects that I would love to work out in greater detail in book form, but I love talking about them. Well, Jared, thank you so much for taking the time. This has been really helpful, especially to talk about what I think has always been an important part of worship, which is the Eucharist. and hope to have you back again. Hey, thank you, Dennis. I appreciate it. All right. There was a lot to think about in this episode, and I'd love to know what your thoughts were. How do you practice communion? Both Jared and I are both ordained pastors in the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, so we have communion every Sunday. What is that like? And not just for disciples, but no matter what your tradition is, what is communion like for you? And how do you think that this conversation could shape what communion looks like going forward? I'd love to hear what you're thinking. As always, you can send an email to churchinmain at substack.com. And also, I'd love to…, Again, hear what you're thinking about this, and what you're thinking about this episode especially. I will put links in the show notes to that episode from Jared's podcast, Complex Creations, for people to listen to. Now, as always, if you want to learn more about this podcast, or listen to past episodes, or donate, visit churchinmain.org. You can also check out churchinmain.subtype.com to read related articles. I hope that you will consider subscribing on your favorite podcast app and that you would leave a rating or a review. When you do that, that actually helps others find the podcast, and I do want to help others find the podcast. There are links in the show notes if you want to make a one-time donation, and also links if you would like to get the podcast sent to your email inbox. And I will also include a link to another episode. This one was actually from Drew McIntyre, who has been a frequent guest, and it was from an episode he did last year. And there is a part in there that I think was fascinating, that he talks about the importance of communion, especially in bringing people together, especially in a time of political polarization. So, that is it for this episode of Church in Maine. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. Take care, everyone. Godspeed, and I will see you very soon.