A Tiny Precious Thing
by Rev. Kelly Wiant
A reflection based on Isaiah 65 delivered at Kevin’s ordination on January 28, 2024
[I’m gracious to Kelly for being a part of my ordination service, and for allowing me to publish her writing on the Intertwined Medium page. —KL]
I met Kevin, his wife, Jennifer, and their daughter, Olivia, six years ago, the Sunday after they had attended a Market Square concert. Sitting in the pews of Market Square Presbyterian Church during the concert, they perused information about the church and youth program. They were looking for a new church home and a place for their daughter to connect with other young people. The next morning, a Sunday, they were back in those same pews, with their daughter, who would soon become an integral member of our youth group. I had the pleasure of working and learning with Olivia as her youth pastor. She joined us on work trips and then we waded through the early months of the pandemic together on Zoom.
My daughter took dance lessons at Jennifer’s dance studio, called appropriately, “The Studio.” To me, Kevin was just Olivia’s dad and Jennifer’s husband until he entered the process of ordination. I served on the CPM [Committee on Preparation for Ministry], which meant I had the good fortune of helping to shepherd Kevin through at least the beginning of the process of seeking ordination. His has been a long journey, which speaks to his fortitude, dedication, and deep sense of call. This day has been long anticipated and long in the making.
So I began to get to know Kevin a bit better on the CPM, but it wasn’t until Kevin shared his desire to create a new worshiping community that we became good friends and companions on the journey. I too was dreaming of creating such a community so our paths became parallel and in many ways merged. We worked with Allison Smith and others for nearly a year to shape what has become the New Worshiping Communities Commission, the body that oversees our work and provides support as we venture into new territory, quite outside the usual church context.
Early in seminary, Kevin felt a call to those outside the church, those who would likely never find a home within traditional church buildings and institutions. Kevin felt called to create a community for those hurt by the church, those disappointed by the church, and those who had never found a home in a church. Now, this is not because Kevin would describe himself this way. No, Kevin has confessed to loving old church buildings, pipe organs, and even bell choirs. We share this in common. In many ways, we are traditional church people who love the church (although see its flaws in sharp relief) but the call is to something different, something outside both figuratively and literally, in the case of Intertwined.
The church has long believed that if we just do what we do better, more people will come. To some extent this is true. When we are faithful and live out our faith with integrity, we create a community that is attractive to those looking for such a community. But we have also persisted in doing what we do in much the same way we have always done it while somehow expecting different results in a world that has changed dramatically and radically from the days when our church buildings and institutions were first created.
Now, let me be very clear in saying that I am in no way demeaning or harping on our churches. I served one I loved and still love for over 20 years and I give thanks for my time at Market Square. It shaped me in ways I’m still discovering.
But there is a growing call and movement outside our church walls that is offering life and abundance. Kevin and I are both involved in the Presbyterian Church’s 1001 New Worshiping Communities. In 2012, the 220th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA made a commitment to create 1001 new worshiping communities all over the country. The General Assembly committed energy, financial resources, and created a network of staff to provide support and resources to those seeking to create new communities. 1001 helps sustain our work through coaching, financial grants, and collegial support.
Since 2012, 668 NWCs have been created, and 543 of them are currently active. That means 125 have been created and since ended. More on that in a moment.
These new communities are as diverse as the pastors and people who find themselves within them. There is a skate park for teenagers in Montana, a yoga studio in California, queer gardeners in Virginia, a Portuguese-speaking community in Georgia, a dinner church for those unhoused in Lancaster, and Intertwined, Kevin’s environmentally focused community in Harrisburg, to name a few. These new worshiping communities represent much of the diversity within the Presbyterian church. Forty-one percent of them are new communities of color.
New worshiping communities are redefining what it means to be the church, pushing boundaries, and teaching the larger church what it means to die and be reborn. While life, death, and resurrection stand at the heart of our faith and life together, we often fail to recognize this reality in our churches. We are afraid of our churches “failing” or dying and cannot imagine resurrection that does not resurrect what we have always known.
In contrast, the NWCs teach us what it means to pour our hearts into a particular ministry and context all the while knowing it may fail and in fact, it probably will in time, for that is part of the process — life, death, and resurrection. Where one community ends, another may emerge to take its place, ever-growing and evolving.
Now, it sounds like a bit of a downer for me to stand up here and tell you that Intertwined and The Circle, the community I am creating, are going to end, and yet, that is part of the joy and tension Kevin and I live into every day. We get to live with impermanence and fragility as part of our daily call in creating. Our communities are created for the moment, not for forever or even a very long time. There is great freedom in that and I believe a faithfulness true to our Scriptures.
Kevin Burrell offered a beautiful reading from Isaiah 65, part of which reads,
“For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating…”
We humans are called to create and co-create with God. It is one of our greatest joys, to use the gifts we have been given to dream, envision, and create. We have created art that can bring tears of joy, institutions that have provided stability and protections for citizens, service organizations that have saved countless lives (think of Rotary International’s work to end polio), and regulations and laws that have brought the bald eagle and the gray whale back from near extinction. We, when we dare to dream and place cosmic and God-centered justice at the nucleus of our beings, create beautiful things that make our hearts sing and surely do the same for our Creator.
And yet, we are not lone creators, we are part of the cosmos, part of God’s vision. We have the joy of creating and striving even though we may not “succeed” but fail by our culture’s definition. But it is not the failure or the end of our creations that we need to fear. Instead, we are “called to participate with God in the struggle for justice and peace, in the end, it is God who will surprise us all by the way in which the new world is born” as De Gruchy stated so beautifully in his reflections on Isaiah 65. Ours is not THE work, but the working WITH God all the while alert and attentive to the breaking in of God’s new world.
A new worshiping community based on care and justice work for creation, such as Intertwined, lives into this reality every moment of its existence. It is a community that understands itself to be part of a larger reality, part of the cosmos, and its existence bound to that which we can only begin to see and imagine. Intertwined is a tiny precious thing called into being in the midst of a universe that is unfathomable and endless. And yet, this tiny precious thing has deep value and meaning in our world, whether it lasts 30 years or five. It is in the seeking, the labor, the advocacy, the meaning making, the intentionality of living, that Intertwined offers abundance to this world of perceived scarcity. So we give thanks for the tiny precious thing that is Intertwined.
Kevin and Intertwined sojourners, thank you for your witness to the world. Thank you for offering life to that which needed to emerge and thank you for your willingness to walk together in whatever it is you and the Spirit are creating together.
Kevin, may this day be one you long remember, not as the end to a process, but as a marker, as an affirmation of you and God’s work within you. May the Advocate, the Spirit, continue to enliven you and give you the gifts that are and will be required to nurture Intertwined for as long as you are given the grace to do so.
May it be so. Amen.
—Rev. Kelly Wiant, Organizing Pastor for The Circle
