By the time I was fifteen, I was pretty done with church.
I’d lived in two countries, three cities, five houses, and gone to seven schools. I couldn’t even count how many churches we’d visited or gone to for a little bit (though I suspect the number is lower than I imagine it to be; children tend to exaggerate). Through a handful of different factors—like the housing market, my dad going back to school to get his MDiv, and changing school districts—I’d been moved around a lot. I was tired of being the new kid at school or trying to make friends at church. By the time I was fifteen, we’d been at the same church for a couple years, which was incredibly long by my count, but I wasn’t really connecting with anyone else my age. I figured I’d seen just about everything the church had to offer. I was visibly resentful and bored, and underneath it I was lonely. I thought I didn’t belong.
Then my dad started volunteering at The Lighthouse Mission in Bellingham, Washington.
That first time at Base Camp, the Lighthouse’s low-barrier shelter for those experiencing homelessness, I might’ve held my dad’s hand the whole time. I was a skinny thing barely out of braces, with frizzy hair and the beginnings of acne. Essentially, I was a socially-integrated teenager who had no experience with folks coming in off the street. Base Camp could get quite rowdy—that night the smell was like wet socks and it crawled inside your nostrils; men buried beneath coats screamed at each other; a woman talked to her shoelaces; and everyone looked ready to defend themselves at any moment which, in retrospect, they were. I had no perspective for what it would be like to live on the street. A nice way to put it is I was unsettled, but “scared” is probably a better word.
“Why are you so calm?” I whispered to my dad.
He looked down at me, all six-foot-six of him, and raised his eyebrows, the gesture that communicated he was both bemused and listening. “It’s okay,” he reassured me.
I scowled. “Sure,” I replied, “for you. This is a jungle, and you’re the biggest gorilla.”
Oh, how he laughed and laughed at that. He still brings it up, how it made him think about perspective, and mine was, quite literally, lower to the ground than his. He could minister to, learn from, become friends with, and live life with our homeless neighbors in a way I couldn’t, simply because I was smaller and had no training with how to exist safely in a low-barrier shelter, which was very different from semi-permanent housing, which required guests to be clean and sober.
But my dad’s perspective on church and ministry wasn’t the only one that changed. I thought I’d seen everything the church could do, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. After years at the Lighthouse mission—where we, as a family, often attended Christmas services or packed gift bags—my mom and dad planted a church with a specific mission. Spring Church, based in Bellingham, has one simple mission: Uncommon Friendship and Common Discipleship. Friendship might be uncommon (made up of socially-integrated folk, people in recovery, those experiencing homelessness, the neurodivergent, the poor, or people across political spectrums) but our discipleship is something we have in common as we try to walk the faithful path with Jesus. It was interesting, trying to both live this out and explain it to people in the Pacific Northwest. Because uncommon friendship doesn’t exactly fit with the Cascadia brand of “tolerance” (it involves being friends with people you disagree with) and common discipleship is way too religious.
So, how did this counter-cultural mission change my perspective? Well, when I was sixteen, my dad was ordained, and when I was eighteen, Spring Church began to grow out of the neighborhood. People from all walks of life started attending: businesspeople, teenagers like me, people on the poverty line, those with no religious affiliation, and, making up about half of the congregants, those from the Lighthouse Mission recovering from addiction and homelessness. Even though Spring Church is a clean and sober church, making it a safe place for everyone regardless of where they are in their recovery journey, for a long time I wasn’t sure how I could be friends with someone so different from me. What was the point of this church? It was so weird compared to anything else I knew. I didn’t tell my parents that, but I’m pretty sure they knew what I was feeling: how is uncommon friendship possible when we’re so, well, uncommon?
One Sunday, I noticed a man coloring during dinner, before the service started. He kept his pencils and paper in an old pringles can, and he looked a lot like Santa Claus. I sat next to him at the round table, watching him trace colored pencils delicately across a picture. It was an owl, surrounded by branches and leaves. Using only a few colors in between the bold black lines, he made a leaf look alive—dark veins and shadows. It was almost like I could reach forward and pluck the leaf off the branch. The man had a cane propped against his chair. We talked for a bit about his drawing; as it turned out, we both liked adult coloring books.
“It’s also good therapy for my wrist,” he said, sweeping a brown pencil across the page with said wrist. “It was nearly severed when I was run over by a car, you know?”
I did not know. I’d never been run over by a car. I’d also never lived on the street, broken up a fight, or stayed in ICU. But over time, as we talked more about what we loved: drawing and poetry and writing and Jesus, our backgrounds mattered less than I thought they would. I started to see LeRoy for who he is: kind, artistic, loyal, and detailed. And he saw me as the writer I am and wanted to be, encouraging me every chance he got. Our backgrounds didn’t disappear—people exist in a context and to ignore that context is to do a disservice—but over time at Spring Church, I realized it had become a space where the uncommon-ness of friendship stood a chance. Where the common-ness of our love for Jesus turned into a love for the neighbor.
“Well,” I told my dad later, “I can see why church matters now. It’s still not my favorite, but I get it now. I see it.”
Before Spring Church, my only interactions with people experiencing homelessness involved ignoring them or giving them things, like coats or soup. Neither involved being friends with them, and neither involved being discipled by them. Being friends with my homeless neighbors means I do things with them, not for them, and realizing that I have so much to learn from them about walking with Christ. Sitting down for a meal together broke through some of the social chilliness that already plagues the PNW and gave us a chance to see and be seen.
After years of being discipled by people who are invisible to most of society and pushed to the margins, I’ve become a better person. I am more mature in my walk along the faithful path. My perspective has shifted, and it’s easier for me to not only empathize with the hardships people have gone through, but also to see the unique gifts and beauty in each person; I see how we’re all children of God, beloved. That’s what the church does. It brings us together in worship, in our common love for Jesus, regardless of our backgrounds. This doesn’t mean we ignore backgrounds, because, actually, I’ve found that my uncommon friends have the most to teach me.
These days, I often find myself returning to the “spring” of these early lessons:
Who are the overlooked people in my life God is sending to disciple me?
Because uncommon friendship teaches me about common discipleship in ways I would have never found otherwise, praise God. Though I’m no longer fifteen, I still need my perspective changed all the time.
Cover photo credit: Curdin
