I have been lucky this summer to be a partial witness to an upheaval at a church in Oakland. I have written here before about what this church has meant to me:

For some months this winter I was feeling more emotionally and spiritually depleted than I think at any time since my early twenties … I am an ex-Christian who does not enjoy Christian services. So it’s a great surprise to find myself saying that the experience that has most helped to revive me in recent weeks has been going to First Congregational Church in Oakland. There is an openness about our brokenness and failures at that church, combined with a warmth and joy, that is unlike anything I have experienced before.

The upheaval has happened because the pastor, Rev. Lynice Pinkard, decided to take a sabbatical. Well, it happened because she decided to let her congregation know that her own life depended on doing things differently at the church. The sabbatical appeared as a way for her to pursue her own health and at the same time to promote a different way of doing church.

When a pastor goes on sabbatical, the UCC church expects a congregation to take on an interim pastor. The local UCC district representative apparently couldn’t recall one of their churches not doing so. But First Congo, as the First Congregational Church of Oakland calls itself, decided not to. Instead many members of the congregation are stepping up to take the role of pastor in different ways. Lynice Pinkard talks about that old radical Protestant image, “the priesthood of all believers,” coming alive in a new way at First Congo.

At yesterday’s service members of the congregation who were prepared to be pastors were asked to come up front. As non-members, my wife and I were among the few left sitting. Then they all put their hands on Lynice, Nichola Torbett gave a remarkable prayer laying it all out, and they let her go with their blessing. They resolved that when she came back, they would continue to pastor, and she would be one among them, not the one they outsourced their discipleship to, in her phrase. It was a very upbeat and joyful service.

Lynice and my wife and I have become friends, through our relationship with Nichola, but to tell the story of Lynice’s summer and how she revolted against the way she had been doing the pastor’s role there is no need for me to break the slightest confidence [not that I would! I'm not that far gone as a blogger], because it is out there on the web in the quite remarkable and passionate sermons she has given in recent weeks. You can listen to them here, and listening is what is needed: reading wouldn’t do at all. I hope they post the last two soon.

Yesterday’s was on a text about Moses complaining bitterly to God that he can’t stand leading the people through the desert any more, and why should he, they aren’t even his children. So God empowers 70 others with prophetic powers to help out. Complaint led to creativity. It couldn’t have been more apt, but it was actually the lectionary reading of the day, used in churches across the country.

Lynice made the comparison of Moses with Mammy, the black slave brought into the big house on the plantation to raise the white children. She used vivid imagery, talking about how the people were treating Moses as one big tit to suck on — and earlier she had said how she felt the same at First Congo. She says “there are no victims here” — the way she pastored was her own choice but it’s killing her nonetheless. She has been trying her damnedest to do an intercultural, interracial church, and to love the white people radically, but it’s not a simple thing to do, and holding in anger isn’t the right way either. I have never encountered anyone so able to express radical love in a service as Lynice, so it was amazing and wonderful to see her express her anger in, as it were, the same breath.

There is an excitement at this church right now about the power of truth telling when the context is a growing belief that it may in fact be possible for people of color and whites to love each other and be the priesthood of all believers together.