Covenant Stories: The Slow Church

The Covenant Stories is an ongoing series by Gordon Atkinson. They are published here each Thursday. There is an archive where you can see them all.

When Philip Gröning wanted to make the documentary “Into Great Silence,” he asked the Carthusian monks at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in France if he might spend a couple of years quietly filming their lives. They said they would think about it and get back to him. 16 years later he received a letter from them. They had considered his request and were now ready for him to begin filming.

What kind of slow-moving world do these monks inhabit? 16 years in the modern world is time enough for two or even three careers. Why would these monks assume Philip Gröning was still interested in this project or even interested in filming anything at all? How did they find his address after 16 years? Did someone write it on a scrap of paper and keep it in a box all that time?

The monks of Grande Chartreuse mark time in their own way. Time in their world moves more slowly. Things unfold gradually. Nothing happens quickly, so when things do happen they are important things. Things that seemed important or even urgent one year might not be so important a year later. After 16 years, people may have forgotten them altogether. Consider for a moment how important a thing must be if it passes the deep consideration and patient process of the Carthusians of Grande Chartreuse.

While our church does not move as slowly as these ancient monks, we are a very slow church. When I am at our church I can hear the people of our world rushing by on the highway while I mark steps down the path to the labyrinth. A car that passes our church might travel a mile before I take another step. Five miles while I consider a painted rock left on the ground by a child. Which of us do you think is actually getting somewhere?

Near the front of our main building sit two rather mysterious slabs of concrete with pink and green paint on the top. They are benches dropped off some 5 years ago by a woman who thought they might make a nice addition to the church. We talked about it at our next elders’ meeting. Not everyone was convinced we needed benches, though we all allowed they might be nice. One person wasn’t crazy about the colored paint. Others didn’t mind it. The general consensus was that someone should probably figure out how to put the benches together and do it. A year or so later, it was brought up again. There wasn’t much energy for the project, but again we agreed that someone should probably go ahead and put those benches together. Another year went by. The concrete blocks sank softly into the earth, the way things do when they sit in one place for long time. New people at our church sometimes wonder what they are. One man told me he assumed they were monuments of some kind. The pink and green paint, still visible, has outlasted anyone who might question how well it fits into the color palette of the land. The benches have become the land, so their color IS the color of the land.

And now these stacks of concrete are indeed a monument. Little children sit on them, for they are the right size, having never been assembled. Boys leap off them, kicking their feet in the air, lost in some imaginary game. I love them as they are and would be heart-broken were I to arrive one day and find that they had actually been put together after all these years.

People tell me that the average stay for a pastor in an American church is 18 months. That astounds me. We might have a stack of rocks on our back porch for 18 months while we talk about what we should do with them. Most of our best stories span 5 or 6 years at least. It takes about a decade just to figure out what’s going on at our church.

So we are a slow church. It is our nature. Many of us are tired of churches that have freshly printed agendas at every meeting and high energy, executive types barking orders and getting things done. We tend to attract wounded, introverted sorts who need to sit in the woods for a while. Maybe for 2 or 3 years. The average time it takes to get a project completed at Covenant Baptist Church is three years. Someone brings up an idea. It gets talked about for a few months, maybe put on the elders’ agenda. If it is still being talked about a year later, we might talk seriously about it. Often someone joins the church who has a passion for this project and gets it going in earnest, like when then Soupiset family joined and got the labyrinth project moving after years of discussion and dreaming.

Unfortunately, the pace of our church frustrates some people. People who have a strong need to make lists and get things done in short order go crazy here. People who don’t like nonsense are uncomfortable here because much of what we do is nonsense, in that we often have no sense of where we are heading with what we are doing or what it will be whenever we finish it. But God bless the delightful souls who cannot abide this place. We don’t worry about them. You can find high-achieving churches on almost every street corner these days. And God bless those churches too, because there are a lot of things that need to be done in our world. But there also should be slow churches, churches where you can stop and catch your breath. We’ve decided that our calling is to be one of those. We are a church for people who feel their life speeding along like those moving sidewalks in airports, and they want to get off for a time. We’re strolling through life here, meandering along at our own spiritual pace.

If you are thinking we don’t get anything done, nothing could be further from the truth. We do things. We just do them slowly. With time as no burden or constraint, we find we can do a lot with our bare hands. Children built our rock-lined path through the woods. Children working with their hands the last Sunday morning of each month. It took 2 years, but why should that matter? I watched a lot of the construction process. The man who guided them was in no hurry and didn’t mind if they lengthened the path only a few feet a month. The children were laughing. They had fun. And they built something our community loves.

There are lighted paths here and quiet, unassuming buildings, beautiful in their timidity. We built these paths and buildings. It just took us a long time. There are strange plants in their native habitat, some of them thorny and dangerous. We move slowly when we build things, so the plants are not disturbed. There are cactus blooms and wildflowers and even native chili peppers that grow wild. You can eat them if you know where to find them. There is a rock in the building with a man’s name on it. There is a pile of wood that has never been used but has a great story behind it. There is a giant tree with a strand of weathered beads near it. We cleared a circle around this tree and made it a sacred place. It only took us 5 years to do that.

So you see, things get done here. But they are slow things. They are things with natural patinas that can only grow with time. Things are settled into the ground and beautiful. These things exist because we’ve chosen to live our lives slowly and deliberately in this community. We’re living on Spirit time, not clock time.

Gordon Atkinson
Covenant Baptist Church

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Tagged as: church, Slow Church, The Covenant Stories