A United Methodist Insight Column
Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, a woman I admired greatly, died March 23 week. Eerily, she spoke after her death, thanks to a reflection she penned some months ago for The Washington Post, and I think her thoughts bear repeating.
Madeleine Albright
Madeleine Albright – American diplomat and the first female United States Secretary of State – died from cancer March 23, 2022, at the age of 84. She is shown speaking at at The Women's Conference held on October 22, 2008 in Long Beach, California. She was born Marie Jana Korbelova on May 15th 1937 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (File Photo by: zz/NPX/STAR MAX/IPx 2008 )
Secretary Albright was a role model for me at an important point in my career. She was the first woman to hold her post, and her first autobiography came out about the time I was named the first woman to be editor and vice president of UMR Communications, the parent company of the 160-year-old United Methodist Reporter newspaper. Although I didn’t agree with much of Dr. Albright’s politics (especially her militarism), I found it enormously helpful to read how she met and surmounted many of the same challenges that I faced as a “first woman.”
When I read her Washington Post reflection, her words struck me as highly applicable to a situation in which we now find ourselves as a church: how to get people to return to in-person gatherings, especially worship, with appropriate coronavirus protections.
Consider Dr. Albright’s words:
To me, resilience of spirit (far more than brilliance of intellect) is the essential ingredient of a full life.
No matter how smart we are, we can allow sorrows and grievances to overwhelm us, or we can respond positively to setbacks — be they caused by our own misjudgments or by forces beyond our control. This choice has rarely been starker than in the past two years. As individuals, we have had to adapt to the shock of unwelcome and unexpected circumstances. Collectively, we have had to bounce back not only from the pandemic but also from doubts about our willingness to pursue social justice, our power to make self-government succeed and our capacity to prevent advanced technology from causing more harm than good. Worldwide, we have undergone a period of trial that has changed us in ways not yet fully revealed.
Clearly, our future leaders will have to be gutsy and resourceful, and so, each in our own way, will we.
After months of reading articles by church experts of all disciplines (worship, leadership, stewardship etc.), I believe that Dr. Albright has bequeathed to us the keys to reforming the church: facing the changes thrust upon us with resilient spirits.
Our first task in becoming resilient is to acknowledge that there’s no going back to life before the coronavirus pandemic. We must be constantly vigilant against the infection that has claimed more than 5 million lives worldwide since 2020. While it appears that we may not need the kind of drastic, widespread distancing we endured during the first waves of COVID-19, we can’t take our immunity to infection for granted. Some of us with compromised immune systems or identified high-risk factors (like me) will have to maintain stricter public health protocols than our neighbors, and we need the church’s support for our caution.
We also need to make concerted efforts to re-knit the bonds of community that the pandemic has frayed. According to the guidance of noted consultant Jason Moore, we can adopt a “both/and” stance regarding participation in church. In other words, the online streaming that has been a godsend during the worst of pandemic distancing must continue despite our desire to bring people back together face to face.
What will it take for us to foster community both online and in person? Mr. Moore and other experts have given us a raft of specific “how-to’s” for building online community. For example, my husband John and I currently are volunteering as “online hosts,” one of Mr. Moore’s suggestions, to provide the kind of shepherding for streaming participants that ushers and others would give to those in the pews. Being online hosts takes us away from physically attending worship, but it gives us the opportunity to get to know those for whom our Facebook and YouTube streaming have become the doors opening into our congregation. I think it’s an example of resilience that so many congregations have adapted quickly to streaming worship services online.
Resuming in-person community right now meets a strong need for face-to-face human interaction. I had such an experience recently at my own congregation. Arriving early, I sat down in one of the sanctuary chairs to write a quick note to a church friend about a creative project on which we were working. In moments, I was surrounded by people who wanted to chat with me on a wide range of topics. We weren’t conducting “official” church business, and yet we were, by forging new links in our relationships because of our physical proximity to one another.
Beyond the blessing of physical presence, I think we as the church are faced with a monumental overarching question: what value do we bring to people’s lives that will motivate them to attend worship and other gatherings in person? Streaming worship really is a boon and a bane at the same time; for many, the ease, comfort, and security of being able to watch from home outweighs the bother of making the trip to a physical sanctuary. Given that option, some are finding physical church not worth the effort, so in-person gatherings seem seriously imperiled.
That peril has significant ramifications for Christianity since our entire premise rests on the idea of “embodiment.” Just as Christ became embodied in humanity in order to bring about redemption, so have Christians become embodied to be Christ’s ambassadors of redemption on earth.
Trouble is, we’ve done such a poor job at our embassy that people don’t find being with us worth their time – time that the pandemic has revealed to be all too precious in the face of an invisible killer.
Embodying the message of Jesus may be the most difficult aspect of resilience for the church. We’ve grown complacent, not recognizing that we no longer live in a social environment where knowledge of Christianity can be assumed. We’ve grown negligent in our own spiritual nurture as well, with the result that we don’t have the necessary skills to tell and show others why we make the effort to follow Jesus, the Christ.
This need for renewal, for a new “awakening” as the Rev. Dr. Steve Harper puts it, may be the coronavirus pandemic’s biggest blessing for the church. We’ve been shocked into taking a hard look at ourselves and our institution, seeing at last what many others who’ve left the church in the past few years have seen: our hypocrisy and our corruption. When people see us really living out what we say we believe, perhaps that will convince them to join us in person.
Now that we’re aware of what confronts us, as Dr. Albright wrote before her death, how will we respond? If we want to get more people back in the pews, what can we offer that will help them live fully in a post-pandemic era? If we want to continue building our online parishes, how do we make the best use of the internet to foster community?
How can we be resilient ambassadors for Christ in a vastly changed world?
Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011. This content may be reproduced elsewhere emailing for permission.