For All Who Hunger

by Emily M. D. Scott

  * * *

  Pastor Phil became my mentor, and Trinity the congregation that eventually sponsored me for ordination. By this time, I had left my job at the big church with flying buttresses and started teaching children’s choir part-time, so I could build St. Lydia’s on the side. I worked most Sunday mornings, kneeling on the carpet with my kids to drum out a rhythm pattern. Every once in a while, though, I had the chance to worship at Trinity.

  Looking out over drug deals and dog parades in Tompkins Square Park, the upstairs sanctuary would fill with the most unpredictable group of New Yorkers I’d ever seen assembled in one place. There were German grandmothers fanning themselves, sitting so solidly in their chairs they seemed likely never to move again. There was an older gentleman who wore three-piece suits in solid, primary colors and a wig with curly black hair, always slightly askew. There was a gaggle of gay musical theater boys who sang in the choir. The pianist, a young man who rarely made eye contact, had been discovered by Pastor Phil via Craigslist. He played with his right foot crossed over his knee, embellishing hymns from the Lutheran canon with a gusto the likes of which no Lutheran had ever heard.

  This wild assortment of people stood and sang together each Sunday morning. “Kyrie, eleison,” they exclaimed in a variety of keys. “On our world and on our way! Kyrie eleison, every day!” They were an unlikely “we,” drawn together to glimpse the living heart that lay beneath their ordinary lives, which ground and ached along. Their worship was not a production, but an exultation.

  One Sunday, the man who wore the bright suits offered to sing a solo. He stood in front of the congregation, struggling to find his place and his note. Everyone sat, listening, eyes encouraging and hopeful. He faltered, and I heard Pastor Phil, still seated in his chair, quietly sing the melody from behind him. The gentleman’s voice met Phil’s, and together they found the melody. Then Pastor Phil dropped out, and the man continued on his own.

  I had thought St. Lydia’s, in its pre-formed state of pure imagination, had the liberty of being perfect, but I was wrong. It had the liberty of being a fantasy. Perfection, I would come to see, came with the particularity of the real—with the love that is practiced among those who are broken. The pianist’s fingers ran up the keyboard and tumbled back down, and fireworks seemed to ricochet in my heart. “That we may live out your impassioned response to the hungry and the poor,” the congregation sang. And I could tell that they meant it.

  Seven minutes to seven, and I stand just inside the front door of Trinity Lower East Side, like a rabbit ready to bolt. It’s Sunday night, and the only people who have arrived for Dinner Church are Rachel, Heather, and Jake. Rachel gets paid to be here, Heather is the cook, and Jake signed up to be the worship leader. If no one else shows up, we’ll hold Dinner Church for just ourselves. I check my phone again. Six minutes to seven.

  The part no one ever talks about is the humiliation. It’s humiliating to try to start a church in an aggressively secular city. To invite people to come to worship when they’ll likely think you’re unforgivably naïve, unsophisticated, uneducated, and conservative to believe in something so off-trend as God. It required divesting myself of the notion that I would ever, ever be anything resembling cool. I’d known this already, ever since I told my fourth-grade classmates about the performance of the Tokyo String Quartet I’d attended with my parents, and observed their reactions. But starting a church was more recent, damning evidence.

  My friend Nadia, another founding pastor, told me that planting a church is a little like throwing your own birthday party every week. I found it an apt comparison. The experience seems directly correlated with that ancient reptilian metric that lives in the recesses of our minds, left over from the days of being chosen last for dodgeball teams or school dances. Does anyone like me? Standing at Trinity’s front door, the question hangs like a deadweight I can’t push aside.

  * * *

  —

  After the trial runs at Daniel’s apartment, we did a six-week run at Trinity Lower East Side with the encouragement of Pastor Phil. We had fifteen or sixteen people showing up. The plan was to worship once a month through the summer, then launch weekly services in September.

  In those glorious days, golden and shimmering in my memory, people wrote their names on the sign-up sheet to cook dinner. Sunday afternoon I’d receive texts from them: “See you at Dinner Church tonight!” The buzz of my phone was like a hit of nitrous oxide or the feeling of a first kiss. In the evenings, congregants arrived with bunches of flowers or homemade desserts, covered in tinfoil.

  Now it’s the end of October, and the sheen has worn off. People have stopped texting beforehand. I have no idea who will show up or how many; each service feels like a crapshoot. Attendance drops to twelve, then ten.

  We’ve launched too soon. That much feels obvious. But tonight is a new low, a reverse version of serendipity in which every person who’s ever come to worship picked the same weekend to go out of town. Heather has cooked food for twenty, and a huge pot of curried chickpeas with spinach sits waiting in the kitchen. Jake, our former rock drummer, peruses the worship script with more care than the task merits, as if it’s a Philip Glass score. It’s just the three of us until Pastor Phil and Joey come down from the rectory upstairs. Then, at five past seven, as I chatter nervously, a single newcomer arrives, a young woman with cropped blond hair bearing a package of Milano cookies. We all fall over ourselves to greet her in a high-pitched welcome.

  “YOU BROUGHT COOKIES!” I exclaim, startling her. She actually takes a step back from me. “THANK YOU SO MUCH—THIS IS AMAZING!”

  During worship we ladle out bowls of Heather’s curry, carrying on energetic conversation with the overwhelmed newcomer, while I silently perish from mortification.

  Her name is Charlotte, we learn. Fresh out of the Peace Corps, she spent the last two years in Mozambique and moved to New York just a few months ago. Reeling with culture shock and searching spiritually, she’s lonely for the close community she found in the Peace Corps and sifting through her feelings about religion. Charlotte doesn’t seem as traumatized by the evening’s turnout as I am.

  “This is wild!” she says as Rachel shows her where to stack the bread baskets in our storage closet. “I can just arrive in New York and sit down for a meal with a whole bunch of people? And on my first night, I know where the bread baskets go!”

  I’m heartened by Charlotte’s response. But the mortification remains.

  “How you doing?” Jake asks, encouragingly, as we carry tables back to the community room together.

  My family connection to Jake goes way back—he knew me when I was in the sixth grade. He’s a decade older than me and a head taller, so he feels kind of like a big brother. Jake had a whole career playing drums for a successful band, a former life he rarely alludes to. Now he’s a writer, wry and whip smart. He’s lanky and long-legged, with a slightly haunted look he counterbalances with a broad, enthusiastic smile. I think he’s sensed that I’m chagrined.

  “Jake,” I tell him. “Seven people. Seven people.”

  “Well,” he says, lifting his shoulders in a shrug. “That’s seven people who aren’t in the self-help aisle at Barnes and Noble.” I crack a smile, rolling my eyes while he continues. “Seven people who were here instead of eating a TV dinner.”

  We pop the legs of the table open and swing it upright. I laugh.

  “That’s true.”

  * * *

  A few years later, with St. Lydia’s safely up and running, I attended a training session for “mission developers”—people who start new churches. I remember talking with one church planter in an elevator. After listening to a day’s worth of presentations about holding one-on-ones and tracking metrics and launch events and blah blah blah, he left the room convinced that his church was failing.

  “We’re not growing,” he told me mournfully. “People come to st
uff but nothing seems to go anywhere.”

  “How far in are you?” I asked him.

  “Six months.”

  “Are there always like eight people at everything?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does it feel like sand slipping through your fingers? Like something’s almost happening but it won’t quite take off?”

  “Yeah,” he answered.

  “That’s totally normal. That’s what it felt like for us at six months. Just keep going. It will shift.”

  This was basically the advice I received from my own mentor, Donald, who had started a church as well. I called him monthly, spilling stories that I was sure were indicative of our approaching demise.

  “Yes, that happened to us too,” Donald would say. “I remember that phase. I wouldn’t worry about it. It will sort itself out in a few months.” Donald would tell me a story about how St. Gregory’s learned together, becoming a community that could take on challenge and conflict. At St. Lydia’s we could barely manage cleanup. I struggled to trust his words, even as they offered me hope. I was like a church-plant hypochondriac, certain that there was something wrong with us, and whatever our diagnosis, it was sure to be fatal.

  Church planting is a lot like child rearing. Both make you feel as if you must be ruining the life of this small being you’re trying to raise toward adulthood. Both force you to reckon with elements of your own personality you’d rather not face. Both send you running to someone who’s done this before you, asking if you’ve fouled it all up. The answer, usually: “It will be fine.”

  I’m certain that I projected all kinds of crap on my church-plant baby. I set St. Lydia’s up with issues they’ll need to work through with a therapist when they reach midlife. We all mess our kids up. The mess, however, is rife with possibility—containing the promise of strength and gift.

  * * *

  —

  That fall, I build a thick skin for awkwardness. Every week I lead us in song and prayer, even when there are just four or five in attendance. “We’re building St. Lydia’s together,” I say hopefully, “and we’re still kind of figuring it out.” Saying it out loud reminds me that it’s true.

  While the first half hour feels excruciating at times, something always seems to shift over the course of the night. We take hands and pray; I feel my breathing slow and my chest unclench. The room seems wider. Rachel stands up and reads a poem with tenderness and intellect. The words vibrate with truth, and unknot something in my gut that needs to be unknotted. We sing a hymn, and my heart feels like it’s blossoming, even when the melody falters. Even on the worst-attended evenings, God shows up in an empty seat and prays with us.

  After worship we clean up together in a riot of energy. We have a habit of breaking things. Heather slams the handle of the mop into a clock that hangs over the kitchen door while enthusiastically swabbing down the kitchen. A visiting priest from Oakland drops the vase from behind the altar while attempting to dispose of last week’s withering chrysanthemums. It seems like every week I write another apologetic email to Pastor Phil, explaining the latest casualty and promising to purchase a replacement.

  By the end of the evening I am always exuberant and joyful, washing dishes in a cascade of laughter and soapsuds. We go home better for having come.

  * * *

  —

  Soon, our numbers start to build. New congregants show up with these looks on their faces, as if trying to decide whether this is a real thing, and if they want to hang around for it to get realer. Worship begins with cooking and setup. As they arrive, Rachel sends people off to chop salad ingredients or set out napkins and silverware. Everyone gets a job. The people who love the idea of making something new are the ones who stick around. Them, and people who need more love than the world is able to give them.

  We meet Raphael, an East Village character with a leather cap and a pronounced limp, who leans heavily on his cane and invites us to the Christmas Day barbecue for the homeless he cooks every year in the community garden down the street. There’s a huge ex-member of a motorcycle gang with face tattoos. There’s Mina, a frail, birdlike girl who says very little, but tells me she’s sleeping on the couch of someone she barely knows. There’s Jebediah, who conducts himself with a level of dignity and decorum suitable to meeting the queen, but who is likely homeless. He contributes erudite comments after the sermon and leaves as soon as there’s a moment to slip out the door without saying goodbye. These, plus people who are young and often new to the city. Charlotte, the newcomer with cookies I accosted, miraculously comes back the next week and signs up to lead worship.

  Then, Ula arrives. I know Ula from my days at the big Manhattan church. She’s a cantankerous presence who leans on a cane and lugs a cacophony of overflowing tote bags wherever she goes. She’s always digging through them for some object that’s fallen to the bottom, spilling refuse around her. With a halo of dark, untamed hair, she’s known by just about every clergyperson in Manhattan. Ula attends Riverside’s morning service and St. Bart’s in the evening. She goes to Wednesday services at St. Michael’s and Bible study at Grace Church. Everywhere she goes she demands attention. She asks agitating questions at inopportune times during annual meetings, quibbles with the pastors’ interpretations of scripture at Bible study, complains to the ushers about the language in the prayers.

  When I see Ula appear on the corner of Avenue B and Ninth Street, aiming straight for our door, I take a deep breath. Ula installs herself at St. Lydia’s, and has plenty of opinions to share. She complains about the food, interrupts Heather as she shares a reflection, then falls asleep at the table. She always finds something to take issue with, and comes armed with comments that seem designed to make me feel small.

  I worry that her quarrelsome nature will put a damper on our dinner congregation. But Heather and a few other extroverted congregants prove capable of keeping a conversation going with the most unlikely assortment of people. When my dreaded archnemesis Awkwardness shows up, I learn to invoke Julian of Norwich, repeating, “All shall be well,” in my mind. Soon I can trust that, despite our patchy conversation and thin singing, we will make it through to the prayers, and at some point that evening the needle will find the groove. A tender story told at the sermon sharing, the weightlessness of silence, and suddenly, there’s music.

  * * *

  Our church weathers its nadir, but riding our swell of energy into the spring gives me reason to be fearful about something else. On the first warm day of the year, I walk south on Sixth Avenue to meet my friend Mieke at the Cornelia Street Café. Weaving through the maze of cobblestone streets, I dodge a typical cast of West Village characters: a rail-thin model carrying two teacup Chihuahuas in her purse, all three wearing sunglasses; bodega owners out sweeping the sidewalk; a line cook smoking a cigarette on the stoop, head thrown back in a laugh as he shoots the shit with a couple of regulars.

  Mieke is a pastor—a Presbyterian, and one of the first out lesbians ordained in the denomination. Colleague after colleague kept insisting we would love each other, so finally one of us wrote the other an email. We met up for dinner and talked for three and a half hours.

  Like me, Mieke’s single, and, like me, she has an array of alarming stories about the harsh realities of dating in New York. We trade them like baseball cards, calling each other in the middle of the workday to report the most recent travesty. The executive director of a scrappy organization fighting for LGBTQ inclusion in the Presbyterian Church, she is hilariously candid and always has a blunt opinion to offer. She sits across from me, wrapped in a woven shawl, fine nutmeg hair tucked behind her ears, scowling as she listens to my most recent dating disaster.

  “So I’ve been on OkCupid, you know?” I report. She nods. “And there was this guy who was writing me, and he asked what I did. And I was so tired of hedging around about it that I just said, ‘I’m starting a church,’ and I sen
t him the link to St. Lydia’s—which I know probably wasn’t smart but I’m just so tired of it.”

  “Uh-huh,” she responds, spearing her mixed greens furiously with her fork, anticipating the coming affront to womankind.

  “Anyway then the next week at church this guy shows up, and I thought he seemed familiar but he wouldn’t really tell me how he found out about St. Lydia’s…”

  “OH MY GOD.” Mieke slams the fork down and rolls her eyes. “It was him.”

  “It was HIM! But he didn’t TELL me it was him! I figured it out right before I preached! And then I had to hold hands with him during the prayers and it was SO WEIRD. Then he darted away at the end after being totally cryptic.”

  I sit, chagrined.

  Mieke rolls her eyes up and lets out an extended sigh. “Well? Does he want to date you?” she asks.

  “Probably not after he listened to me talk about Jesus all night.”

  “Why did he come there?” she demands.

  “He said he’s been looking for a church and also someone to date, so he thought maybe he could find them both in one place. Like one-stop shopping?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Mieke erupts. “You’re at work! You can’t be his pastor and also date him!”

  “I mean, I know that. But they don’t really know that.”

  “Would I ever show up at your job if you were…an accountant or something?” Mieke questions me, plowing back into her salad. “It’s so weird.”

  “The thing is,” I tell her, “he’s the only one who wrote me back. Everybody else just stops writing when I tell them what I do. It’s like being a pastor neuters me or something. Makes me immediately not sexy. I went out with this one guy who just wanted me to apologize for all the sins of Christendom. I get it…we get a lot wrong as a religion. But that’s a lot for a first date.”