Jeanne Marcus
May 18, 2025
Fifth Sunday of Easter
I’d like to share a moment I had a few weeks ago: it was a perfect D.C. spring morning– the day was fresh and bright and tangy, and the trees were just budding out with that fleeting glow of new spring green.
I had parked in the Takoma Metro lot, and was walking through the grassy space between the bus stops and our corner here. The streets and sidewalks had their uniquely Sunday morning emptiness and quiet. And there ahead and off to my right a little, was the brick and glass of our building, with its iconic metallic signage: Seekers Church. Something about the angle of the sun caught the storefront in a way that looked like a blessing.
In that particular moment, it seemed as if I had somehow bracketed all that I believe I know about the church and the community behind the glass window, as if I didn’t have any idea about the actual life that happens here.
And a question, or in fact two questions –rose up in me: “What is it that really goes on in this building?” and “What will go on in this building?” A very evocative moment, for sure. Fortunately, by the time I reached the front door, it had lifted enough for me to remember the code for the key pad, and I went in.
Those moments of altered perceptions reminded me of what Zen Buddhists talk about as Beginner’s Mind. It’s a term pointing to an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions, even when approaching something that one has been studying for a long time. It is an invitation to approach what’s before us in the way a beginner approaches a new learning.
I’m sharing those moments with you this morning because this sermon is a way to invite all of us into a process and event that might encourage a period of Beginner’s Mind about our community. It’s an invitation into a conversation about “The Call—and the Future—of Seekers Church.”
The kernel of this project was sown within Servant Leadership Team some time ago, as the team thought about these concerns: about naming the embodied call of Seekers at this moment; and about discerning what the future could be for this Christian faith community.
Meanwhile, remembering that the SLT had invited Stewards to let them know of any agenda ideas we had for future Stewards’ meetings. I’d been moved to write a them a long email. to SLT with my ideas for future Stewards’ agendas. As it happened, my email focused on some of the same questions they had been considering: and they invited me to sit in with them at their next meeting so we could share our leadings with each other. This led to a proposal that the SLT offered at the Stewards meeting just last Sunday. The Stewards voted unanimously to bless, encourage, and support this undertaking.
The proposal begins with this invitation this morning. It’s more than an invitation, really: it’s a heartfelt appeal– to the entire Seekers community to join in a day of listening and conversation together, all of us.
Though the details are still to work out, the vision is that we would come together on a Sunday in a supportive environment, and be in circle together in a spirit of prayer and community to speak of essential concerns in the Seekers community. We would close our time by taking Communion with each other.
Our hope is that our conversations that day will provide foundational understandings for drafting a new Call Statement: it would replace our current statement, which was written almost 50 years ago. Since then, both Seekers and the world has changed significantly.
We don’t have a date for this conversation yet: we are hoping it will be within the next four months. Having this time to envision around the entwined topics of our church’s call and its future is so important right now, that we earnestly ask that everyone in the entire community who can,to please join us in this process.
The conversations will be unfolding around two dimensions of concern.
The first dimension relates to the shape of our life together in community right now. As we all can see, Seekers is an ageing community. This is a fact that we should be in conversation about together. We don’t need to see this a problem or a malaise that has to be resolved; that’s not it.
But there are clearly a number of our structures, missions and functions that will be increasingly challenged as we grow even older, and as many of us pass from this life. Discussing this reality together is essential to our being able to face the future with awareness, vision, and compassion.
In some ways, these matters around our ageing can be better seen as creating a blessed and beautiful opportunity for us to visit or revisit other dilemmas in our community life. There are questions of outreach, and of inclusion and membership; questions about equipping and inviting newer members to leadership positions; questions about whether and how well our current structures and understandings are serving us as we really are now. With this invitation, we’re putting ourselves behind the hunch that our digging deep together toward shared appreciations of the heart of Seekers life and call, will lead us to the wisdom and spirit we need to live wisely into the future.
We know that as individuals, we live fully into our specific calls, but then later, many begin to discern a different call on their life later in their journey. It is the same with faith communities like ours: the Holy One, who has called us to be church together from the beginning, is always a dynamic Presence, ever doing a New Thing, and then asking the people, “Do you not perceive it?”
Our hope and trust is that prayerfully, through courageous speaking and also open, deep, and even tender listening, we will indeed begin to perceive this New Thing for our life here and now.
In my ponderings, I’ve come to draw a distinction I feel is important. This is the distinction between our deepest values on the one hand; and then the ongoing core practices founded on these our values on the other. Maybe the easiest example of the distinction is the essential value we give to the recognition that the Holy Spirit can speak through any of us; and our core practice is the open pulpit, where each Sunday, the Word is brought by different members of our community, or even those beyond.
There are other core values, like the importance of shared committed leadership, that could possibly be embodied equally fittingly by other structures and practices than those we are using now. What to maintain, and what to amend or rethink will be an aspect of our conversations in this process.
***
The other dimension of our conversation is the time and place in which we will have this conversation. If this conversation was unfolding even a year ago, it would be unfolding in an environment of fundamental social and political norms that, however short they fell short in supporting justice and inclusion, at least respected basic standards of respect for human rights and dignity, and for the physical world around us on which we rely for life itself. Then the conversation about Seekers call and our future might move forward without much more needing to be said up front.
But these times are now upending much of what we formerly were living, thinking, and believing about our history and institutions since Seekers came into existence in 1976, the year Seekers’ drafted its first Call statement that year.
But now, in this perilous year, where do we stand as a church? We will still want to name what our deepest values are; to identify what our unique gifts are for the well-being of the world; and to explore how to meet the future.
Now, though, won’t we need to explore an additional dimension: What are we willing to stand up for? take risks for? change the shape of our community life for? We can only dimly imagine what might be asked of us as a Christian community in this time and place.
In her sermon last week, Deborah pointed to manifest ways that our current presidential administration is engaged in unconstitutional and unconscionable persecutions and acts of destruction; and in the shredding of our essential legal, social and physical safety nets.
In his sermon three months ago, Paul Holmes’ listed dozens of areas in which various individuals and groups at Seekers have been working to defend vulnerable peoples, places, ways of life, and truths. He highlighted that each and every one of these have currently come under threat and are now targets of hate, racism, and vindictiveness, and that the destruction shows no sign of slowing down.
ALL of this will be in our hearts and—even in our bodies, as we move through these conversations together.
***
All of this, all of it, is part of the fullness of the conversation that is being proposed. There are still a lot of practical details to be worked out. As I mentioned, we hope this Day will happen within the next four months. The idea is that an outside facilitator would be chosen to lead this time. Our conception is that a small group outside SLT would be charged with the actual planning.
The envisioned lead-up to the event is actually starting now, with this sermon. We expect there will at least one or two more sermons. We also hope that all of us can begin talking about these issues together even now. Our mission groups, ministry teams, and other groups are places we can be in such conversations. Likewise, the informal discussions that happen on Zoom after worship can be such a place. There could be other possibilities as well. The idea is: We really want everyone to be part of the conversation starting now, and on into that day itself! After the event itself, a summary of the day’s reflections will be created, accompanied by specific proposed next steps.
So this is our current understanding now about what we hope we will create together.
Finally, there is something that I want to share that is beyond what was included in the proposal that Stewards blessed last Sunday.
The notion comes from a radically unexpected source: David Bohm. Bohm was a hugely important quantum physicist who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb.
Surprisingly, later in his career, Bohm became interested in human communication. He wrote a treatise in which he laid out his learnings: his key finding is that equal status and “free space” form the most important prerequisites of communication and of appreciating differing beliefs. Here is a piece from his writing:
“From time to time, the tribe gathered in a circle, and just talked and talked, apparently to no purpose. They made no decision. There was no leader. Everybody could participate. There may have been wise ones who were listened to a bit more—but everybody could talk. The meeting went on, until finally it seemed to stop for no reason. Yet after that, everybody seemed to know what to do, because they knew each other so well. Then they could get together in smaller groups and do something or decide things.”
Which says to me: it is more important that we create the conditions for this kind of communication than that we get down to drafting any specific language we want to include in a new Seekers Call statement.
Opinions may differ on these points: I suspect there are some who might be thinking “Heaven Forbid” at this level of indeterminacy. Either way, I personally, as just one Seeker, am very energized by the vision of what this time could be and do for this community.
And I hope that the discussion we need will begin now: actually, in a couple minutes, just after the Offering.