LAB FOR LIVING

People across the state ask me where First/The Open Door is located, and I tell them we are just off Kirkwood.  When people don’t know Bloomington or IU well enough to understand where that is, I say “We’re about four blocks away from the IU campus and one block away from the center of downtown.”

God has placed us in an extraordinary setting.  We have the opportunity not only to minister to a vibrant city, but also to be a place where students and faculty can journey with God.  We can be a faith-full, loving, serving, thinking community where generations of students can be profoundly shaped by the Carpenter.  One young graduate student, after spending several years at First, commented this winter, “This has been the best experience of my life.”

At campuses like Duke, the University of Chicago, and Harvard there is a university church in the center of the campus.  IU, because it is a state school, really has no university-supported chapel with a worshipping, serving congregation.  I wonder if we  -and not us alone, but in partnership with several other churches adjacent to the campus-  see ourselves as a university church?

Stephanie Paulsell teaches at Harvard Divinity School.  In a recent Christian Century (12-26-2012) article she said this about university churches as labs for a new way of living:

 What are university churches for?  Are they nostalgic relics of a nearly forgotten religious past?  Ceremonial settings for the rites of academic communities? Anomalies that sit uneasily in relation to the university’s dedication to research and experimentation?

I (have) learned that a (university) church is one of the most porous places within a university, a place where the world can enter, pose its questions and share its own challenging knowledge.  I learned that in a church it is possible for faculty, staff and students to encounter each other in ways not governed by distinctions between age and rank and profession.  I learned that churches within universities can become meeting places for religious people of all kinds.

Some of the people in the church have lived long lives of faith.  Others at FUMCB/The Open Door have no experience of religious practice and they are looking for a way to cultivate a life with God and in community.  No question is off limits here.

University churches offer opportunities to find out what we might learn through faith, service, community and prayer.  We need places to practice having faith: faith in one another, faith in ourselves, faith in God.

The exciting thing is that university students and faculty have this place where questions can be asked, faith can grow, love can be exercised... and do it side by side with people of all ages from across the community.

Jesus keeps inviting the disciples to put out into deeper water and make new discoveries with God.  Sell all you have and give to the poor.  Try on forgiveness as a way of life.  Worship God with reckless generosity the way a woman breaks open a jar of perfume and pours it over my feet.  Become like a little child.  Put out into the deep water…and that is an invitation we offer faculty, students and staff at Ivy Tech and IU.

In one sense, as a university church, we’re a lab for new ways of living.  In another sense we are like the place where a river meets the sea, currents meeting and mixing together, sustaining all kinds of life.  As the university offers a place that engages the mind, God, through us, offers people a place, a community, that engages and shapes the soul!

We may not be on the campus, but we’re close…and our closeness tells us something about our mission.

In Christ and for Christ,

Mark