This post is the second in a series in which I am playing around with metaphors new and old for the church. Future installments will explore images such as bodies, temples, midwives, gardens, families, flocks, and more.
Today: bioluminescent organisms.
In the first five years after Slow Church came out, I used a lot of my vacation time to travel to give talks about the book, lead workshops, and preach. Between 2014 and 2019, I did more than 110 such events across the United States and Canada. That I was on the road talking about slowing down and staying put was an irony not lost on me.
I remember in 2016, during one 120-day stretch, I was traveling for 30 of them. I spoke 22 times across ten states, curating discussions about Slow Church for conferences and colleges and congregations from Seattle to rural North Carolina. When the last event was over, I drove to Chicago for a couple days of actual vacation before flying home. It was my first time in that great city in 15 years. I had rented a car, so I spent a lot of time driving around, through one neighborhood and another, and out to the wealthy suburb where I was staying with some friends of friends.
What I saw through my windshield was a city deeply segregated. Neighborhoods of enormous monetary wealth next to vast neighborhoods of striking economic poverty—with apparently no mixing of the two. And what I heard on the TV and radio were the statistics of a city soaked in blood: 324 murders in the first six months of that year alone.
On my last day in Chicago I went with my friend Tim to a Cubs game. Tim is the co-founder the Parish Collective, a network of neighborhood-rooted churches. He lived in Seattle at the time but happened to be visiting Chicago the same week as me. By the time he and I met up at Wrigley Field, my heart was in despair for Chicago. But I was stunned as I listened to Tim describe his own visit to the city.
Unlike me, Tim had gotten out of his car. He had walked the streets and met pastors and laypeople, people of passion, creativity, and goodwill. In those same neighborhoods that I had grieved over, judged at face value, and nearly written off—all from the safe confines of my rental car—in those same neighborhoods, Tim had heard and seen stories of life and hope.
I despaired. Tim was energized.
Violence, poverty, and racism are real, obviously, but Tim had seen the Kingdom of God sprouting forth in the granular, in the everyday stuff of life.
Let Your Life-Light Shine
Through Slow Church, as well as movements like the Parish Collective and even the nonsectarian Strong Towns, I have become convinced of two things that fill me with hope and purpose:
Across North America, God is helping churches see their neighborhoods with fresh eyes. In short, we are witnessing the re-localization of the local church.
It is within the context of the neighborhood that the church itself is best seen. And this is what I want to focus on today.
The metaphor I keep coming back to is that of bioluminescence, the chemical process by which organisms—fireflies, some deep-sea fish, and other creatures—emit light. (The word derives from the prefix bio-, meaning “life,” and lumen, or “light.”) I’m especially fascinated by bioluminescent algae and plankton, which can make waves glow, illuminate footprints in the wet sand, or appear as miles-long light trails behind ocean ships.
In his autobiography, Jim Lovell, the commander of the Apollo 13 mission and a former Navy pilot, recalls the time in 1950 when he had to perform his first night landing on an aircraft carrier.
Through a series of unfortunate events, Lovell had gone off course. His instrument panel had shorted out, as had the cockpit light. There was no moon, and thick clouds blocked out the stars. He was plunged into darkness, with no sense of where to find his ship, the USS Shangri-La. But when his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw a faint greenish trail in the water below him. He recognized it immediately as the phosphorescent algae being churned up by the propeller of the aircraft carrier, a road leading him back home.
In The Wild Places, British author Robert Macfarlane describes wading into the sea in an island cove near Scotland, and “flinging long streaks of fire” from his fingertips like Merlin. “When it was undisturbed, the water was still and black. But where it was stirred, it burned with light.”
Macfarlane also told this story:
In 2004, a father and son were sailing in the Gulf of Mexico when their yacht was capsized by a gust of wind, sixty miles offshore. They clung to the hull, as it was carried on the powerful currents of the Gulf. After night fell, the water became rich with phosphorescence, and the air was filled with a high discordant music, made of many different notes: the siren song of dolphins. The drifting pair also saw that they were are at the centre of two rough circles of phosphorescence, one turning within the other. The inner circle of light, they realised, was a ring of dolphins, swimming around the upturned boat, and the outer circle was a ring of sharks, swimming around the dolphins. The dolphins were protecting the father and his son, keeping the sharks from them.
Bioluminescent marine organisms live just below the surface of the water. They all have the capacity to make light, but they’re so small that they can only be seen in community with each other. “By processes not entirely understood,” says Macfarlane, “these simple creatures ignite into light when jostled. They convert the energy of movement into the energy of radiance.”
Maybe you’re starting to see why I’m so drawn to this image. As followers of Jesus, we have the light of Christ inside us. We are “theoluminescent.”
I’m reminded of one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture, from Isaiah 58:8-12:
“Then when you pray, God will answer.
You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’
If you get rid of unfair practices,
quit blaming victims,
quit gossiping about other people’s sins,
If you are generous with the hungry
and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out,
Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness,
your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.
I will always show you where to go.
I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places—
firm muscles, strong bones.
You’ll be like a well-watered garden,
a gurgling spring that never runs dry.
You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew,
rebuild the foundations from out of your past.
You’ll be known as those who can fix anything,
restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate,
make the community livable again.”
Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness. What a reputation for the church!
St. Paul told Christians in the city of Ephesus to “walk in the way of love”:
For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord…[Everything] exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. (Ephesians 5:8-10, 13)
Theoluminescent, we are “children of the light” (John 12:36). For too long, too many displaced and disembodied churches have lived above or apart from their neighborhoods. But what if the church got below the surface? What if we moved more of our lives into the neighborhoods? What if we let ourselves be jostled and churned up in our particular places? And what if we did all this within the context of communities of other believers? I think what will happen is that the church, like those bioluminescent organisms, would turn the energy of movement into the energy of radiance.
We will be a trail of light pointing the way home.
We will glow in the dark.
By God’s grace, we will shine.
A Galaxy of God’s Kingdom Come
Try to imagine something with me.
Picture in your mind’s eye a map of the United States. The map is lit by huge external lights, the flood lamps of cultural and political Christianity. These external lights are the reason the United States has sometimes been mistaken as a “Christian nation.” We recognize this place. It is familiar. For many American Christians—though not all—this spiritual geography is safe and predictable.
Now imagine the flood lamps of Christendom begin to dim.
Church attendance drops. We witness the rise of the “Nones.” Christian culture warriors see themselves beaten back on one high-profile battlefield after another. Christian nationalism not only mutes the light but turns it a sickly hue. The external lights of mainstream Christianity grow dimmer and dimmer until, by a particular set of standards, the country as we knew it largely fades from view. The spiritual landscape once so familiar, predictable, navigable, and, for some, safe, is now plunged into darkness.
Let your eyes adjust and you may still see the faint silhouette of the United States…but not much else.
But keep watching. Do you see that? A pinprick of light. It’s not coming from outside the U.S., but from the inside. It looks like it might be coming from the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago.
Then another pinpoint of light. It’s not large, but it’s steady. It’s coming from the Golden Hill neighborhood of San Diego.
First in ones and twos, and then in fives and sixes, these pinpoints of light appear on our map of the United States. There are two or three in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, one in the Lents neighborhood in Portland. Small but steady lights appear in Wenatchee, Boone, Johnson City, Appalachian Ohio, and Syracuse, in Silverton, Oregon where I live, and wherever it is that you live. More and more of these pinpricks of light are coming online now—in the tens and twenties or more. They are giving shape and detail to the country, but they are doing so from the inside.
What you’re seeing, of course, is the church. This isn’t the abstract “Church of Seattle”—these are often small, humble communities of Jesus-followers weaving fabrics of love and care in their particular places, in parishes in cities and suburbs and rural communities. Some of these neighborhood expressions were already there, but, like the Milky Way, they were often blocked from our view by the background light of cultural Christendom. But there are new things happening too, and what is emerging over time is a constellation (or even a whole galaxy) of God’s Kingdom Come.
I know there are many who are afraid, and who maybe even despair, as attendance drops in churches and denominations throughout North America. I want to acknowledge the real grief and uncertainty people are experiencing over these shifting demographics. Even so, I can’t help but feel a sense of hope and excitement. Because beyond our rental car windshields, something is happening. In one faithful encounter after another, God’s reconciling work is unfolding.
Yes, there is an extent to which the church we’ve taken for granted in the United States is fading from view.
But that’s not the whole story.
Not even close.
Currently Listening
I recently returned from Inhabit, the Parish Collective’s annual conference in Seattle. Royce Lovett was part of the worship team this year and we sang his song. It’s been stuck in my head ever since. This is also the song my kids woke up to this morning.
John! Thank you for your words....your metaphors. "theoluminiscent"!!!! yes! I was introduced to Isaiah 58:8-12 (The Message) by your colleagues/friends/spouse at LNP (Parish Collective.) about 7 years ago. It has been my an anthem/liturgy for me in my neighbourhood for the past 7 years.