The 10th Sunday after Pentecost
August 3, 2026
I came to Seekers for my children; I stayed for the people I found here.
This wonderful summer series of sharing of the Word that Celebration Circle has invited us into is an outgrowth of a couple of conversations this past spring. In the Stewards debrief of the May 17 Call to Evolve all community meeting, Marjory Bankson said “What I’d really like to know is what brought people to Seekers initially and how has that contributed to their spiritual growth?” The next day, Marjory offered those questions to the Spiritual Companions group and we had rich and varied sharing, hearing each unique story. I hope that, even after this round of preachings, Celebration Circle will continue to invite folks to engage this theme as they are inspired.
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My own answer to the first question is that I came to Seekers for my children. Years later, when my spouse, Pat Conover and I were first getting together, he would say that I came to Seekers for answers to questions I didn’t know I had. Pat had a higher regard for my spiritual curiosity than I did or do! And bless him for that.
I want to tell you about a few of what we might call milestones for me at Seekers that might help me answer the second question. And mind you, these are just a very few. I’m not even talking about meeting and falling in love with Pat and then our amazing wedding at Wellspring that involved so very many Seekers in so very many roles. Some items relevant to that are on the altar and I’m wearing a stole made for us and our wedding officiants by Kate Amoss. Or the wonderful Team Seekers cycling team I participated with for many years – tee shirt is on the altar, too.
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After obligatory church as a child – fresh Sunday dress, white socks, Mary Jane shoes – and as a teen – what seemed to me obligatory confirmation classes that did nothing to pique my curiosity about God, church or what any of it had to do with my life – I had pretty much abandoned church-going by college. Paul Crumrine, to whom I was married when we adopted our children, had also fallen away from his church upbringing. But both of us had some nagging voice inside that told us that parents are supposed to introduce their children to some kind of religious experience. For us, that led to Seekers, as Sharon and Dave Lloyd were up-the-alley neighbors and our daughter, Susanna had attended Seekers with Erica when they were both quite young. Also, Paul Holmes had joined Seekers – the two Pauls had been college and post-college roommates. So we knew three adults at Seekers, which was more than we knew anywhere else.
We arrived together as a family one Sunday in 1987, I believe, just after my mother had died. Peter Bankson was reporting on Marjory’s family gathering around her dying father and what Peter was sharing was a rich family experience quite different from what my mother’s death was for me. (She had died unexpectedly so I was not present.) The very fact that Peter had a community in which to tell this story made an impression on me that, obviously, has stayed with me for a long time.
Seekers had a lot of children in the five to ten age bracket at that time as well as a cohort of parents willing to teach several different age groupings of Sunday School classes. So this was a good place for our children.
Personally, the language of religion – God talk as I call it – did not come naturally to me – as many of you know, it still doesn’t – and when, in an effort to get more involved, I volunteered to be part of a Sunday School curriculum search group, I felt embarrassingly out of place. On the other hand, Fred Taylor’s invitation one Sunday to all Seekers to join a group supporting several families that were near homelessness was something I could respond to. Saying Yes to Fred’s invitation was an important decision for me. The family I was paired with had three children, two of whom were the ages of my children. Over time, our children got along well together and those children sometimes came to our house for the day or overnight. We also shared the FLOC fundraising walks and the family joined Seekers at least once for our semi-annual intergenerational pajama parties at the Wellspring Center in Germantown, MD. More on that in a bit.
I spent my entire legal career representing people with low incomes – first in court and other legal proceedings at the local level then as a policy advocate at the federal level. But I had never had a close relationship with people in a financial situation so starkly different from my own. I’d go to their house and find virtually nothing in the refrigerator and the mother would ask me for money for cigarettes. I honestly can’t recall how I responded in those situations but I’m reasonably confident that I did not offer to grocery shop with her. When we first met, they lived in transitional housing in Columbia Heights. What I had to offer them then, to the mother specifically, in addition to friendship, was a car and access to a telephone, both of which were critical to her finding permanent housing. Later in our relationship, I came to understand that the kids, especially the girl, paid a price for hanging out at my house: I assume, though I never knew for sure, that their mother was resentful of their enjoyment, especially if she had not been invited. When I wanted to invite one of the children to attend an event with me, Pat correctly pointed out that I might actually be successful if I invited the mother as well and that turned out to be true. Creating and maintaining a friendship over racial and wealth disparities was an ongoing challenge that encouraged me to be especially thoughtful about my words and actions. Seekers opened me to this experience and supported me in the midst of it.
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Circle time before formal worship was another WOW experience for me. I mentioned Peter’s story earlier. I also remember when Jane Lieper, at age 65, announced that she was joining the Peace Corps and going to Thailand, a place with which she did actually have some familiarity. My mind was blown – at that time, 65 seemed pretty old to me – I just turned 82! – and here was this ancient woman, going off on a new life adventure. I barely knew her at all but chose to write letters to her while she was gone. And that was fun for me.
I’d never experienced anything like our Circle Time, now Gathering Time – regular weekly opportunities to share anything that feels worth sharing from your life. For a long time, I found the experience overwhelming as I thought I needed to take on caring for everyone’s dying parent or just diagnosed-with-cancer sister or struggling child and also for all the social justice engagement opportunities I was being told about. After a time, I was better able to recognize that the beauty of this sharing is that you allow many people to hold your news, each in the way they are able. This is a lesson I am still working on.
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After my first all-Seekers overnight at the Wellspring Center, I wrote a thank you note to Sonya and Manning Dyer whom I perceived to be the sort of informal hosts of the event. I had found the time there extraordinary – an intergenerational gathering in the beauty of the Wellspring Center at Dayspring Farm, with no agenda other than being with each other for conversation, walks, play and rest. I had recently connected with the nearly homeless family I spoke of earlier and opined in my thank you note that Wellspring would be a wonderful place of respite for city-dwelling people struggling as hard as that family was in their daily lives. Not long after my note, Sonya invited me to breakfast – one of the famous Sonya Dyer breakfast/lunch ministry events – and let me know that if I wanted to invite the family the next time, Seekers could make that happen. I did. That invitation from Sonya truly knocked my socks off. And the family really enjoyed themselves – on at least one and possibly more overnights.
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When my mission group’s sponsoring of a Christian Growth retreat for our teens looked like it might be derailed because the person organizing it was called into an intense period with their business, I somewhat timidly stepped forward to take the reins. I say timidly because I felt I had little to offer substantively to help our children further explore Christianity but I was pretty sure I knew the right people to gather – including the other mission group members – to make the event successful. This was, perhaps, my first small step into leadership in the community and I think the event was, indeed, a success.
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One day after I’d been at Seekers for nearly ten years, I woke up deciding I wanted to be a Steward. I don’t really have words to describe why, other than that Stewards was the core of the church and I wanted to be on the inside. As I talked with my friend and then-Steward, Rachel Halterman, about it, I realized another extraordinary thing about Seekers – anyone can become a Steward if they choose to undertake the steps of preparation. You aren’t nominated, you aren’t chosen, there is theoretically no limit on the number of Stewards – it is your choice to be in or not. Perhaps the most intimidating aspect for me was writing a Spiritual Autobiography because, as I mentioned earlier, the language of religion doesn’t work well for me so the notion of talking about my spiritual life didn’t really compute. Peter Bankson patiently guided me through several drafts. I’ve been a Steward ever since.
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In 2012, Stewards began a search for a new person for the Servant Leadership Team, some months after the death of Kate Cudlipp the previous year. I tentatively considered applying but was finally persuaded by the invitation from a Steward to do so. As I had once before, I told myself if I could write a letter of application that felt true to me, I would submit it. My letter included reference to my discomfort with the language of religion and suggested that that discomfort might be an asset for those coming toward Seekers with similar lack of strong religious upbringing. I’m not certain that that has been the case but I have appreciated being able to be useful to this community in a few ways through the SLT.
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In May 2020, just after the murder of George Floyd, Erica Lloyd invited all Seekers to a vigil for Floyd, for Black Lives Matter, and against police violence. Many of us showed up that Friday in May for a single day vigil. Jacqie Wallen said why don’t we do this every week and so we did and still do, six years later. In those early days, a few of us started meeting casually after the vigil to talk about race. A year later, in April 2021, just after Derek Chauvin was convicted of Floyd’s murder, Erica Lloyd preached about police violence, several members of the congregation said “I’m with you, Erica” and thus was planted the seed for what is now the Racial and Ethnic Justice Ministry Team. While the ministry team has been blessed by Stewards, its creation was wholly from individual actors with no particular formal “credentials” in Seekers speaking out about something that mattered to them. How freakin’ amazing is that? REJMT is the quintessential example of dispersed leadership, a value this community claims as important.
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In 2024, I preached a sermon entitled “Why We Come to Church” in which I borrowed language from Kathleen Norris’s book on the vocabulary of religion, Amazing Grace. In that book, Norris recounts that a Presbyterian minister once told her that we go to church because someone might need us there. To which Norris replies “And I may also need to admit that I need them.”
I came to Seekers for my children and here I found smart, well read, experienced people, broken and whole, as we say in communion, exploring their relationships with the Holy, engaged in continual learning about how to love (the language of religion calls this spiritual formation, I think) – who weekly modeled for me generosity, engagement, curiosity, vulnerability, and the power of invitation, among so many other things. The unique aspects of our weekly Sunday worship – gathering time, open pulpit, reflection time – allow all of us to participate, to inform and inspire, to be informed and be inspired, to learn and model courage.
For many of us, well, I’ll just speak for myself, I have a life-long journey of recovery from my childhood image of God as the old white guy in the sky who is sometimes confused with Santa Claus to the discovery that God is in us and among us all the time, every day. Even though we all encounter God in many places other than church, I think showing up every week helps to remind us of that. And provides us the opportunity, as Kathleen Norris’s minister says, to be there for the one who needs us, or to encounter the one we need.
So, did coming to Seekers for my children contribute to my spiritual growth? Maybe. I just know that what I found here is why I stayed.