One of our congregants – I’ll call him Dave – showed up at Porter Square one recent Sunday lugging a big plastic full of clothes, hunched over and looking dejected.  He told me it took him two hours to get there, due to closures on the red line, but he said that he really needed Mass, that it got him through the week.  This didn’t stop him from wandering away and missing almost the entire service, nor did his departure make me doubt the sincerity of his need for whatever it is that he finds with us in Porter Square.  After the service, he explained to me that he needs to have surgery -- what he called an “exploratory” surgery to diagnose a tumor on his brain, and another to remove a node from his heart.  To have the surgery, though, he has to refrain from drinking for 24 hours.  From what I could understand through his tear-choked voice and his somewhat scattered sentences, he simply can’t do it.  He keeps promising himself that he won’t drink, but inevitably does, in a cycle made only more awful by the self-blame.  Toward the end of our conversation, he asked me if I would threaten him that I wouldn’t speak to him unless he stopped drinking.  I didn’t do it.  The Outdoor Church seems to me to be based on offering unconditional presence, no matter how many times someone goes back to alcohol or makes impossible promises.  We do not go about doling out rewards and punishments in the form of giving or withholding conversation, compassion, care.  Much as I hope that Dave will, this week, somehow resist alcohol, it is unlikely.  I know this.  Measurable improvement, clear progress, is not something we’ll see very often. 

What, then, might we be offering, if not clear improvement?  We do the best we can, I think, to embody the love of God that we can never ourselves alone hope to give.  We point to the divinely loving presence beyond ourselves, in hopes that our congregants might begin to know -- even if just for a moment -- the healing love of God.  I think, too, that we offer a kind of mirror through which congregants can see themselves as human beings; individuals with dignity; lovable; worthwhile; valuable.  We try to see through the addictions, the odors, the brokenness, to the imago dei in each person.  And, in doing so, perhaps our congregants might being to see this in themselves.  An African woman theologian, Mabel Morny, writes, “When I think of liberation, a vision comes to mind.  A vision of a fuller and less injured life in a world where people can say ‘I’ with happiness; a vision is a means of restoring life.”  The Outdoor Church can strive to embody this vision, recognizing that such a world is not yet our world but that, even so, every person we meet has the potential to say “I” with some degree of happiness.

       One of my favorite aspects of the Outdoor Church is the “doing” aspect. We physically do a lot of things: we drag the cart with Communion supplies down the street, we set up an altar, we roll coolers with sandwiches, we walk to visit people, and we drive to 240 Albany Street and other places our congregation might be. As someone who comes out of the United Church of Christ and the Congregationalist tradition, I know that the “talking” and “thinking” aspects of a church are important too: we trust that the Holy Spirit moves us toward truth when the Word is preached by a person and heard and responded to by a congregation. We locate truth in reading, interpreting, hearing, thinking, and responding to Scripture. 

       But it gives me cause to worry when all we do is talk and think about Scripture, instead of acting on it. One of the most beautiful things about the Outdoor Church is our attempt to both think very carefully about Scripture and then to act on what we have come to believe is the meaning of Scripture in a given time, place, and environment. For me, having a church so focused on action is a bit of a relief. Although I’ve attended a number of churches that felt a religious imperative to social or political action, it often ended up that only a portion of the congregation was active in this kind of effort. At the Outdoor Church, however, the “doing” aspect is integrally related with our identity as a church and as a congregation. This feels right to me and is an identity I will seek to recreate in congregations I may pastor in the future or at chaplaincy programs with which I may work.

One of my favorite aspects of working at the Outdoor Church is that I am suddenly in a position in which it is socially acceptable to do the right thing. I know that Christians are called to help people who are on the margins of society and I have known this for as long as I have been involved with the church. Chronically homeless people seem to be one of the most obvious groups of marginalized people and having some kind of relationship with the chronically homeless would seem to be one fairly explicit and uncomplicated way of following the word and example of Jesus Christ. 

However, there is tremendous social stigma surrounding homeless men and women, so that beginning this kind of relationship entails a social risk. I've become especially aware of this when I have run into people I know along our sandwich route and felt a little embarrassed to be seen lugging around a cooler and stopping to talk to the people in our congregation. Sometimes I pretend I don't see them or I try to scurry away and hide behind Jed or Pat. I feel this way even though the Outdoor Church is often well-regarded among the Harvard Divinity School Community. 

For the time being, though, the Outdoor Church provides a way for me to begin to learn about the lives of homeless men and women in a setting where it is more socially acceptable to do so. This said, the Outdoor Church is also helping me to move away from my need to only do things that are socially acceptable. Soon, I hope to be in a mental and spiritual position in which it does not matter to me if the right thing is socially acceptable.