This fall brought two opportunities I’m grateful to share with you—both deeply connected to the kind of faith, justice, and spiritual imagination we hold dear at Reservoir.
First, I was honored to be featured in the October issue of the Center for Open and Relational Theology newsletter. Many of you know I completed my Doctor of Ministry in Open and Relational Theology this year, and it’s been meaningful to stay connected to that growing community of scholars, pastors, and lay leaders. You can read the feature here:
Theology, for me, is never abstract. It’s always connected to how we love our neighbors, understand God’s presence, and move through the world with humility and courage. Which leads me to the second update…
In late May, and again this past Labor Day, I co-led a 12-mile walk from Lexington Battle Green to The Embrace memorial on Boston Common. These walks were organized by Prayers for Liberty—a clergy collective I’m part of that brings together leaders from many faiths and traditions to pray and act for democracy, human dignity, and shared sacred values.
While many of us are also members of groups like the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, the Massachusetts Council of Churches, or the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis, Prayers for Liberty isn’t owned by any one institution. It’s a grassroots effort, rooted in a shared conviction that our faith calls us to speak into public life with both courage and compassion.
On these walks, and in our organizing, I’ve experienced something I consider holy: people from very different backgrounds finding common purpose—not by ignoring our differences, but by honoring them. In a time when “diversity” is often twisted to divide, we see it as a doorway to solidarity, imagination, and hope.
As part of our efforts, we delivered a signed letter to members of Congress urging the protection of democratic values and human rights. This wasn’t a partisan act—it was a moral one, grounded in our faith traditions’ commitments to dignity, justice, and the common good.
This work matters. It takes time, prayer, and persistence. But it also brings unexpected blessing—through new friendships, shared learning, and the chance to walk alongside longtime advocates who’ve held this fire for decades.
I’m grateful to add my voice and presence to this work, and to stay rooted in the legacy of faith-based movements for justice that continue to shape my life and ministry. And I’m grateful for the dozens of you that have participated in these marches and public prayers, and the many other ways so many of you are actively pursuing a more just and peaceful world together.
If you’d like to get involved in our community’s work for social justice, email Pastor Lydia. And if you’d like to learn more about Prayers for Liberty, this recent piece in the National Catholic Reporter is a good place to start.
During America’s great civil rights movement of the 1950s through 1970s, church-going Christians were on both sides of the great fights for justice in the United States.
In the Black freedom movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, James Baldwin, John Lewis, and thousands of other Christians pursued a more just and equal nation for Black Americans and all people, even as the majority of White Christians fought against their cause or stood aside in apathy.
In many other American justice movements of the era, the same dynamics were true. Many in the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, and the newly founded Metropolitan Community Church championed gay rights in the era of the Stonewall uprising, while the majority of Christians opposed this cause. In the women’s and disability rights movements, Christians supported justice and equality, just as others sought to stand in their path.
Infamously, the same was true a generation earlier in Nazi Germany. While the ideology of the Nazi movement wasn’t Christian, the majority of its architects, leaders, sympathizers, and murderers were baptized Christians. On the other hand, many Christians were later celebrated for their part in resistance movements and in sheltering Jews and other groups targeted by the great evil of that age.
There are many reasons why Christians oppose justice or are just not interested in seeking it.
Sometimes Christians stay away from justice fights because they assume God cares only about the well-being of souls in the afterlife, and not the state of bodies in this life. They “become so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good.” On a related note, many Christians think the good news of their faith has nothing to do with contemporary justice. When their pastors or leaders discuss justice, they can be accused of preaching politics rather than the gospel. It’s good and healthy not to promote specific political candidates or parties from the pulpit. But when churchgoers don’t want to talk about the differences their faith can make in the great causes of contemporary life, we’re not purifying our faith; we’re making it irrelevant.
Sometimes Christians don’t just stay away from justice causes; they actively oppose them. One reason is that they rigidly read parts of the Bible out of context. During the Civil War, the majority of American Christians cited the Bible to defend America’s violent enslavement of African descendants. Christians have cited other scriptures to reject the need to care for creation and pursue environmental justice as well. In each case, the Bible verses they are citing are real, but they are not reading them as Jesus and the best of the Christian tradition instructed them to – through a lens of love for God and neighbor, and what will produce the best fruit for people, communities, and the earth.
Christians have also been so attached to their own economic and other self-interests, or their patriotic national interests, that they have done harm to the people and places God loves in order to protect put themselves or their group first. Movements to make one’s country great again, at others’ expense, are not new.
At Reservoir Church, these reasons to stay away from justice work are not compelling to us. They are sober warnings to people of faith that in the name of our God or religion, it is easy to become hard-hearted and unloving and to end up on the wrong side of history.
Participation in God’s longing for a more just world is an important part of Reservoir’s DNA. It shows up in our vision, in which we long for many people in Greater Boston and beyond to connect deeply with Jesus and our church and to absolutely thrive as a result. It shows up in our core values, one of which is action – to seek justice, show compassion, work for reconciliation, and hope for transformation in joyful engagement with the world. And it shows up in our worship. Our preachers talk about all kinds of ways that the ancient stories of our faith intersect with modern life, including God’s inspiration for us to work for justice. And our recent annual Pride and Juneteenth services, led by members of our LGBTQ+ and Black communities, respectively, include stirring calls for justice as well.
We understand that there are many reasons for churches and followers of Jesus to joyfully work for justice in our communities and world at large. Here are just four of them.
It’s what God commands. The oft-cited and beautiful ancient prophecy in the Bible’s book of Micah states: God has told you, human ones, what is good and what the Lord requires from you: to do justice, embrace faithful love, and walk humbly with your God. This verse isn’t the only one, either. Throughout the Bible’s prophetic tradition, people insist that God loves religion that seeks the good of society’s most vulnerable, just as God hates religion that is not aligned with activity for a more just world.
It’s in our prayers. The model prayer, which Jesus teaches, a kind of architecture for the ways Jesus’ followers are instructed to talk with God, tells us to pray that God’s kingdom will come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The comment about God’s will is a key to what this language of the kingdom entails. Jesus does not reign through any of the many empires whose presidents and monarchs have claimed to be on God’s side. God’s ways are honored when the good and just, and loving desires of God come to pass in our world. This is what Jesus teaches his disciples, then and now, to pray for, yearn for, and live for.
Justice is WHO we are and what we always have been about at our best. While Christians have too often been on the wrong side of history – polluting the earth, enslaving and colonizing, neglecting or even terrorizing vulnerable minorities among us, at our best, we’ve been on the side of justice. First through third century followers of Jesus, persecuted by the Roman Empire, were famous for their community’s love and protection for widows, orphans, and other humans whose well-being was despised and rejected by Roman elites. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century British and American Christians were leading moral visionaries and activists in the abolition movement. In contemporary American and global life, followers of Jesus are at the forefront of the movement for the mattering of Black Lives and the elimination of sex trafficking. At our best, justice is simply what we do. It is who we are.
And justice is in our common self-interest as well. Because Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God can be misunderstood as patriarchal or tyrannical, contemporary Christians have translated his words with other phrases. The late Methodist theologian John Cobb called it the “commonwealth of God,” emphasizing Jesus’ vision for the collective well-being of all. The Cuban feminist theologian Ada Maria Asasi Diaz called it the “kingdom of God,” emphasizing Jesus’ vision for right relationships among the whole human family. And the great civil rights leaders like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis imagined it in public life as “Beloved Community,” a society in which our friend Drew Hart likes to say, “everyone belongs, everyone matters, and everyone can thrive.” Jesus taught us to pursue such a world together and warned us that God will judge us on whether or not we live with the just love and action that helps it be so.
While love and action for justice show up throughout our church life, two recent ways we’ve embodied these concerns are in our annual Soccer Nights program and in our leadership of a campaign called Prayers for Liberty.
For a lot of kids and families, equipment and membership in soccer clubs are prohibitive. All around the country, lower-income students and students of color get pushed out of sports, including soccer. In general, enrichment opportunities are limited to privileged kids, while lower-income kids miss out. For nearly 20 years, we’ve run a free, week-long evening soccer camp that promotes athletic skill, leadership development, and citywide unity. Each summer for one week, around 250 kids, their families, and 70-100 volunteers gather for a neighborhood party where dozens of languages and nations of origin are represented. Our camp has been replicated in 10-15 other communities in Greater Boston and beyond. While church and community volunteers work really hard on this program, it’s also incredibly fun. Soccer Nights lead volunteers have often been known to call the week of the program the best week of the year.
We’ve looked to surround Soccer Nights with other ways to express love and pursue justice in our neighborhood as well. For nearly a decade now, Reservoir has spent $10,000 every year on a scholarship program for alumni of Soccer Nights, each year helping ten first-generation college students from our neighborhood pursue their dreams through higher education. It’s one of many ways Reservoir uses our time and our collective resources to pursue a more generous and just world.
Recently, Reservoir has also been involved in an interfaith campaign to help local faith communities stand up for our shared sacred values and our country’s best democratic principles. In response to the grave attacks of the current presidential administration on due process, the rule of law, and many other basic, constitutional, human rights, our senior pastor, Steve Watson, and hundreds of other faith leaders in Massachusetts have written to and met with members of our Congressional delegation. We have marched from Lexington, the birthplace of American liberty, through our city of Cambridge to the state capital of Boston. And we are planning dozens of public prayer and witness events on August 3, 2025, to mobilize people of faith to stand up and pray for a more decent and humane America, in which all of God’s children have their rights and lives protected.
Diversity is a blessed opportunity to connect with God’s creation. At Reservoir Church, we celebrate diversity by empowering everyone to take up space, whether in the pews of our church or in the community we share.
What Does Diversity Mean to Reservoir Church?
When discussing diversity in Christian churches, we often mean having a different race, ethnicity, gender, family background, personal convictions and worship styles. For us at Reservoir, diversity goes beyond a person’s physical and socioeconomic status. We see diversity as having something of value to offer to the community without losing one’s sense of self. We create a sense of belonging through our common love for Jesus.
Biblical Perspectives on Diversity
The Scripture talks about diversity and inclusion in multiple instances, such as Galatians 3:28, which reads, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
This sentiment is echoed in Revelation 7:9, which reads, “After this I looked, and there was a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”
Benefits of Embracing Diversity in the Church
Embracing diversity in the Church opens the community to more people. It makes others feel more inclined to become part of a community, especially one that understands our unique differences and goes out of its way to celebrate them. Some of the benefits of embracing diversity in the Church include:
Creativity in worship: Diversity welcomes more voices to worship. It’s an avenue to sing praises to Jesus in ways we’ve never done before and introduce our church to broader possibilities in ministry, worship and outreach.
Increased empathy: Promoting diversity also means welcoming differing opinions, but it doesn’t mean encouraging conflict. A diverse church stays humble, gracious and empathetic even in the face of misunderstandings.
Fun traditions: Diversity in multicultural churches creates opportunities for fun traditions. It gives us the courage to embrace the unfamiliar and teaches us to open our hearts without prejudice.
How Reservoir Church Celebrates and Practices Diversity
Reservoir Church has always preached about celebrating diversity in our community. Our dedication is evident in how we foster an inclusive and multicultural environment among members. We go beyond typical statements about inclusion by celebrating differences inside and outside our church. Here are some ways we celebrate and practice diversity at Reservoir Church:
Creating safe spaces for worship
Uplifting those who are traditionally oppressed
Actively voicing our support for our siblings in the LGBTQ community
Promoting equal access to work opportunities and resources
Building teams for ministry projects with members of all ages and backgrounds
Join a Community Bound By a Life of Faith
Reservoir Church embraces diversity, whether in race, gender, family background, worship styles or personal convictions. Join us in worshipping Christ through a life of faith. Visit Reservoir Church for an in-person service or connect with us to learn more about service opportunities.
Before you participate in a community, or even visit, it’s fair to have a sense of what you can expect to experience there. This is especially true for a church. At Reservoir, we meet many people who haven’t been to church in a while, if ever. Some haven’t had a lot of experience with Christian churches or with organized religion in general. Some people have had experience but it hasn’t all been positive. So we’d like you to know what you can expect at Reservoir if you visit us on a Sunday or if you want to get involved in any other aspects of our community.
Our Sunday gatherings in Cambridge are the heart of our community, offering a casual, welcoming, and vibrant environment. When you join us, you can expect an experience that is practical, spiritual, and fun. You’ll find a diverse and inclusive community made up of people from various ages, backgrounds, races, cultures, sexual orientations, and gender identities. We’re here to warmly welcome you—no pressure, no guilt, just genuine connection!
We meet at 9:30 a.m. in our beautiful old sanctuary built by French Catholic immigrants to this country. You’re welcome to enjoy high-quality, free coffee, tea, and breakfast snacks, which you can bring with you to enjoy during the service. Most weeks, we offer dedicated programming for babies, children, and youth, led by trained staff and volunteers. These programs provide a safe, nurturing, and developmentally appropriate experience, fostering both community and spiritual growth for our kids..
Our services themselves are about 70 minutes long. All of the components connect the best ancient traditions of our faith with modern sensibilities and present-day culture and expectations. A typical Reservoir Church service includes:
Music and prayer – Our band leads a couple of songs at the beginning and end of the service, and one of two people will lead prayers. Several people are available near the end of service to personally pray for your concerns or needs for healing. Throughout history, people of faith have gathered to sing, pray, and seek connection with God in the best ways they know how. We honor these timeless traditions while embracing approaches that feel accessible and meaningful in today’s world.
Announcements and community moment – One of our pastors will welcome everybody, share a few announcements, and sometimes lead us in a community moment, like the introduction of new children to the community or a time to celebrate a great joy in a community member’s life or grieve with someone after a loss.
A 20-25 minute sermon. One of our pastors will offer a teaching that connects the traditional sacred texts of the Bible with our present-day concerns and questions. Our pastors don’t tell us exactly what we need to think, believe, or do. They try to share stories and wisdom that help us sort those things out for ourselves.
A tiny meal called Communion– We honor the life, teachings, and sacrifice of Jesus by sharing a small piece of cracker and a sip of juice, symbolizing the body and blood of Christ. This act reminds us of God’s ever-present help and love with us.
A couple of chances to say hello – Once during the service and again when it’s over, people say hello to their neighbors, learn a new name or two, and get to know someone new just a little bit.
In addition to meeting each Sunday morning at 9:30, we stream a version of our service online on our YouTube channel as well.
Not everyone has the best associations with churches, and we get that! Here are just a few things that we promise will not happen here:
Asking visitors to stand up or otherwise be less anonymous than they want to be
Pressuring you to give money or to do anything you don’t want to do
Using obscure religious language that assumes prior experience or commitment
Guilt- and fear-based teaching that judges you
Uniformity, rigidity, and conformity
We hope you’ll visit us sometime on a Sunday and see for yourself!
Reservoir is more than a single weekly service, though. We are a community that invites everyone without exception to discover the love of God, the joy of living, and the gift of community. And there are many ways beyond Sunday mornings to do this.
We have about 25 community groups where smaller groups of people meet somewhere between weekly and monthly for connection and support. These are great places to make a few friends and sometimes learn something new.
There are many ways to volunteer within the church or to serve our broader communities together. These range from making the Sunday morning coffee to taking care of children to coaching soccer to working on social justice campaigns.
We have periodic special events for deeper connection, like dinners in people’s homes, church cookouts, celebrations of cultural festivals and holidays, and an annual weekend retreat on Cape Cod.
Through our Sunday services, website, and year-round workshops, we guide people in cultivating a spiritual life that complements – rather than conflicts with – the insights and resources offered by science, medicine, and education.
At least once a year, we offer a class called Unpack to help people who have had negative religious experiences unpack their baggage with faith and/or church and decide how they’d like to move forward.
We believe that these practices of connecting and exploring faith in God and the way of Jesus together inspire us to experience the love of God, the joy of living, and the gift of community. Each new person who joins us brings something unique and beautiful, enriching our community and making this truth even more profound!
I’d encourage you to check out one of our upcoming services and fill out one of our connection cards so we can get to know each other.
This fall, on a crisp, sunny Sunday morning in October, members of the Reservoir community gathered around a fire pit we’d set up in our parking lot for a mortgage-burning party.
For the first time in twenty-one years, our church was free of debt. We are no longer directing large monthly payments toward our bank. Instead, we’ll use those funds on programs for community well-being and the sustainability of the church. We rejoiced that this is a church with an abundant future.
We personalized the moment of celebration, thinking of prayers of gratitude for ways we believe God has helped our church thrive or that God has helped us to thrive financially. We are grateful for when we have more than enough for our needs and to be generous to others. We wrote those prayers of gratitude on little slips of paper that we added to the fire.
We were honest about the complexity of the moment. Our church is now debt-free, but most of us are not. We thought of our sadness,anger, fear, and worries connected to our debts and our financial struggles. We turned these into prayers too. We wrote our prayers of lament for our financial lives on slips of paper and we added these to the fire too.
As we burned the final statements of our debt, we marked the close of a season defined by risk and obligation and stepped into a new chapter filled with freedom and abundance in the life of the church.
We touched the ground or the bricks or some other part of the property and acknowledged that while we technically now own this property free and clear, we know it doesn’t really belong to us. Our spiritual ancestors who came before us built this property and funded its purchase by our church. We honor them. To our indigenous ancestors who first resided on this land and hold an enduring claim to it, we seek to honor them with respect and gratitude. We also believe that God is the only true owner of this land. So we pledged by faith that we will not act as owners of this property but as stewards, taking care of this church for ourselves and for the broader community and for the generations to come.
It was a holy and beautiful day for us.
This was all made possible by Reservoir Church’s founding generation, the people who founded our church in the 1990s to be a place where longtime churchgoers and people who’d never gone to church or who had given up on church could discover the love of God, the gift of community, and the joy of living together.
This was also made possible by the early generations of the church who by faith and through generosity raised over four million dollars to purchase and renovate the property back in 2003-2004.
This day was made possible by wise Board members, Board treasurers, advisors, and the generous households who pledged and gave over $1.4 million to our 25th-anniversary capital campaign in 2023-2024.
Reservoir Church now has funds and cash flow to invest in our property’s sustainable future. We have a team of designers and engineers working on a ten-year maintenance and improvement plan for our sanctuary, including structural safety, repairs, better environmental impact, and more hospitable lobby and bathroom areas.
Reservoir is also preparing to launch a spiritual and mental wellness initiative in 2025, to expand the impact of our Beloved Community Fund, and to begin investments in like-minded Christian ministries we can partner with and support and learn from more deeply. We are so grateful for this freedom and opportunity.
Days like this remind us too that big projects that take a long time really can come to completion. Big dreams really can come true. When we trust in an abundant God and show up in solidarity together, we can see big things into being that none of us could do alone.
The majority of us are feeling exhausted and angry by contemporary politics. When asked about America’s political climate in a large survey this year, words like these came to mind: Disgusting, divisive, dysfunctional. Corrupt, crazy, confusing. Broken, bad, sad. And yet in this election year, we’re confronted with politics everywhere we turn. Our religious communities haven’t always helped very much either. As a pastor, I regularly hear people talk about their disappointment with their churches, how they’ve approved of all kinds of toxic people and policies in political life, or how they’ve been disengaged and silent, as if our politics don’t matter at all. Is there a better way for us? How can faith in God and participation in church bring us peace in the middle of a distressing election season?
Peace is a big part of the promise of the good news of Jesus.
Jesus brought steady peace to his closest friends and followers amidst storms, both literal and metaphorical. In his final days with them, he acknowledged that while their lives will sometimes be full of trouble, he will bring them peace. “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you,” Jesus said. (John 14:27) After his resurrection from the dead, Jesus found those same disciples hiding behind a locked door, and like a parent calming and anxious child, he got close to them, breathed on them, and said, “Peace be with you.” (John 20:21) Later in the Bible, the early followers of Jesus name peace as one of the foremost fruits – benefits or results – of faith in God and also promise a peace that goes past all our understanding as the result of learning to pray, entrusting our cares and concerns to a kind and loving God. (Galatians 5:22, Philippians 4:7)
Peace is a big part of the promise of the good news of Jesus. But what does this peace look like, especially as it relates to the stresses of politics? And then how do we actually find or cultivate this peace in our lives?
It might help to first name what the peace of God is not.
We know that when we are endlessly reactive to horrible political news, doom scrolling through the biggest tragedies in public life, outraged by the weirdest and most harmful things our politicians say and do; we are not at peace. If we focus too often on all the biggest threats in the world, those real and those manufactured or exaggerated by others, we will be stressed out more than is good for us or anyone else. Human beings were never meant to have access to so many sad or scary things. Most of them are bigger than our ability to really do much of anything about them. Regular emotional reactivity, outrage, fear, and stress over our world and its politics are not the way of peace.
We also know that some people promote a kind of peace which is nothing more than apathy mixed with fantasy. In biblical times, the prophet Jeremiah criticized the privileged and checked out influencers of his age who pretended the world was better than it really was. He said, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14) Not caring about the violence or suffering of the world because you close your eyes to it all is not the way of peace. Disengaging from politics or public life entirely because you are privileged or naive enough to not think you are affected by it is also not the way of peace.
Instead, real peace comes when we are engaged in seeking harmony, justice, and well-being in the world for ourselves and for others, while we are also anchored in perspective, hope, and commitment to our own well-being. To put it bluntly, peace is the art of taking a deep breath while still giving a damn. Indigenous wisdom keeper and follower of Jesus, Randy Woodley, puts it more artfully than this. He says that peace is living on earth in harmony together.
At their worst, Christian churches have been disturbers of the peace. They’ve disengaged from their call to pursue justice, turning their back on the evils of the world or even perpetuating them. Or they’ve failed to become sanctuaries, where our bodies and spirits can find safe harbor and be protected and renewed amidst the troubles of our lives and the threats of the world.
But at their best, Christian churches have been powerful promoters of peace, teaching and practicing ways of sanctuary and renewal for body and spirit, and seeking a more just and peaceful society, in a spirit of love, friendship, and hope.
Let’s look at five ways that faith in God and participation in a local faith community can promote this kind of deeper peace this fall:
1.Cultivating Detachment
Detachment is being less urgently invested in particular dramas and situations. It’s learning that our well-being doesn’t need to be tied to the outcome of most circumstances. Most spiritual and religious traditions encourage different ways to cultivate this kind of attachment. The way of Jesus is no exception. In the prayerbook of the Bible, called the Psalms, we’re reminded not to put too much trust in any human leaders, who are mostly not coming to save us. (Psalm 146:3) This includes our favorite politicians, by the way. Even at their best, they have our interests in mind less than they claim and can help us less than they say they can. We can get a little less invested in particular political outcomes through gratitude, noticing and saying thank you to people and to God for the good in the present, despite whatever dangers and threats we face. We can also cultivate detachment by spending less time on social media, television news, or wherever else we’re most likely to get caught up in the endless outrage-driven news cycle or our age.
2.Practicing Regular Rest
The ancient ways of faith in which Jesus lived included commitments to regular rest and renewal, commitments that are meant to guard and ground us in any season of life, however abundant or meager, however hopeful or scary. Jesus practiced and taught what the Bible calls sabbath rest. Sabbath is the old Hebrew word for regular rest and renewal. The Bible encourages us to break our rhythms of work and any other required or compulsive activity to remind ourselves that to be human is not just to work, consume, and react. To be human is first to be free. It is to rest, to play, and to love. It is to be alive again. Choosing an hour per day, or a day per week, or whatever else makes sense in your life, to not work, to not use technology, to break any other patterns of busyness and consumption, can have a powerful impact on the peace of our bodies and spirits.
3.Learning to Pray
Prayer is like the legs of faith. It is the art of living our lives as the small, finite creatures we are, while knowing there is a loving, wise, divine creator who cares about us all. One powerful prayer practice for peace is called centering prayer. In centering prayer, we sit silently for 5, 10, or 20 minutes, letting our attention rest on a positive spiritual word whenever our mind returns its distractions or worries. Another powerful prayer practice for peace is called the examine, where we call to mind or write down the highs and lows of our days, and let ourselves say thank you to God for the good, say sorry to God for the times we lost our way, and say please to God for the help we need for the day to come. A third powerful prayer practice for peace is to do what the Bible calls, “casting our anxieties on God because he cares for us.” (I Peter 5:7). Name your anxieties of the moment, hold your hands open in front of you, and imagine God picking up your worries and fears and holding them for you.
Any way we can be real with ourselves in communion with a higher power we name as God, talking out our concerns in the light of a bigger love and truth, is going to increase our peace.
4. Becoming a Mystic Activist
I get the phrase “mystic activist” from the wise Christian leader and author Curtiss DeYoung. It’s also promoted by the contemporary author and activist Christena Cleveland and was at the heart of the genius of the great American author, philosopher, and civil rights activist Howard Thurman. A mystic activist is active in working for a more just world. A mystic activist commits to the spiritual and personal renewal that keeps one from getting chewed up or burned out by the difficulty of it all. A mystic activist cares enough about the state of the world to feel the anger and despair of the way things are. But a mystic activist stays connected to faith, hope, and love to not be consumed by anger or overtaken by despair. This is a combination of getting into the game of making a more just and peaceful world and staying in the game sustainably as a healthy and peaceful person.
Beginner mystic activists like me, and maybe like you, regularly look for a few ways to care a little more, to be a little more active in our part in political or public life to work for a more just world. At the same time, beginner mystic activists also look for a few ways to go deeper into a more robust faith, a more abiding hope, and a more steady love for all people and all things. Healthy religion will major in this, with practical and regular invitations to deep and healthy spirituality and to powerful, helpful action in the world.
5. Participating in a Supportive Spiritual Community
We don’t become mystic activists without a lot of help. Most of us have no shot at learning to pray, practicing regular rest and renewal, and cultivating detachment without a community that is teaching us to do these things, modeling and encouraging us in it on a regular basis. If a spiritual community is regularly pushing you to be more afraid and to judge more, it’s not doing its job. That’s not the community for you. But if it is giving you ways to know and be known, to trust and to love, it’s going to help you find peace. Not only that, it’s going to help you be a peacemaker, someone that promotes harmony and well-being not just in yourself, but in your communities and in your world at large.
Reservoir Church’s Mission Amidst Political Tensions
You can be a caring, engaged person in the world, involved in politics and other parts of public life, and still be a person of deep peace. We can live in harmony with others and ourselves, even in scary, violent, threatening times and even in toxic and stressful political seasons.
At Reservoir Church in particular, we’re organizing our fall around exploring these things; what the Way of Jesus looks like in public life and how we can be people of peace and justice in a tricky, complex time in American life. Prominent nationally acclaimed friends like David Gushee and Drew Hart will join our own pastors in teaching how Jesus’ vision for the purposes of God in our communities can encourage, inspire, and guide us. We hope you can join us in person on a Sunday in Cambridge, MA or online through our YouTube or Spotify channels as we all explore what profound peace looks like for us all in this season. To say up to date on what’s happening at Reservoir, subscribe to our mailing list today!
On June 19, 1865, over two months after the Confederate surrender, U.S. troops in Galveston, Texas announced to over 250,000 enslaved Black people in that state, that they were now free. The next year, churches in Texas began celebrating June 19th as a day of liberation, calling it Juneteenth. From there, celebrations spread and grew over the years, to become what some people call America’s second independence day. It is a day to commemorate the end of the enslavement of Black Americans and to celebrate Black culture and history.
In 2021, the United States adopted Juneteenth as a national, federal holiday. Some people celebrate this as another important accomplishment for equity and inclusion. It’s important to have days to tell the truth about our country’s long, slow progress in achieving its stated ideals of liberty and justice for all. And it’s invaluable to have opportunities to center and celebrate the culture and stories of Black Americans. Other people have more complicated feelings about the holiday. Juneteenth was recognized as a federal holiday, just as parts of America have been eliminating and censoring Black history and culture from public schools. Most of the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement remain unaddressed. I’ve heard more than one friend express: we wanted justice, and instead, we got another holiday.
Reservoir Church seeks to honor both aspects of this holiday. We see Juneteenth as an opportunity to celebrate and center Black people and culture and take joy in our victories in achieving greater freedom and flourishing in our lives and communities. After all, our vision is that many people in Cambridge, Greater Boston, and beyond are connecting with Jesus and our church in deep ways. We embrace the good news that is often centered in African American theology; that God’s call for humankind is not only for personal spiritual uplift and hope in the afterlife but for greater liberation, justice, and thriving for our spirits, our bodies, and our communities in this life. Juneteenth is an opportunity for us to celebrate this vision of the Kingdom of God as Beloved Community for us all.
Juneteenth isn’t only a celebration of freedom stories in our past. It’s an opportunity to reflect upon the ongoing realities of injustice in our society and the freedom stories we want to struggle to achieve. Since our founding in 1998, Reservoir has been a multiracial church. Over the years since then, we have made increasing commitments to equity, diversity, and inclusion, as we seek to be a community of profound belonging for all of our diverse members and as we seek to embody God’s big dreams for more just communities and for diverse expressions of human kinship and worship.
Juneteenth is one of the many Sundays when we think about these big dreams. On Sunday, June 16th, we will celebrate Juneteenth through the food we serve, the music we sing, and in the spoken word poetry around the freedom journey of one of our Haitian American members. A new friend of Reservoir, Reverend Darrell Hamilton, will preach at our 9:30 am in-person service on “The Invisible Man” and at our 11:00 am online service on “God in the Ghetto.”
Join Us for Our Juneteenth Celebration Service!
On Sunday, June 23rd, we will announce some of the ways we continue pursuing equity, diversity, and inclusion as a church, including how we will plan for more of this in our Sunday worship services in the year to come. This church will continue to honor the stories, the culture, and the contributions of all our diverse community members, as we try to forge a beautiful community of belonging for all people. We will continue to strive with God and one another for communities of greater freedom and justice for all people, as we work toward the birth of a new age of Beloved Community, when all humans live together in peace and equity, as brothers, sisters, and siblings in God’s good creation.
At Reservoir Church, we believe that God loves us all, with no exceptions. Every morning at Reservoir Church we say from the top of the service that Reservoir is “a place where everyone, without exception, is invited to discover the love of God, the gift of community and the joy of living.” Everyone. Without exception. We hope in repeating this phrase, we all continue to come to know these truths more deeply:
I matter.
I am loved.
I am welcome here.
In 2014, Reservoir Church made a commitment to honor and affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all individuals, including those that are in the LGBTQIA+ community at all levels of participation, membership, leadership and marriage. We affirm that all individuals are created in the image of God, honoring the truth that every human being has a unique relationship with God and reflects aspects of God’s character that are essential to the health and flourishing of a whole community, including love, creativity, activism, compassion, and moral imagination.
Historically, most Christians have not held welcoming or affirming views on diversity of sexual identity, orientation, and gender identity. Along with that, great harm has been endured by members of the LGBTQIA+ community in the name of God. Perspectives are evolving and progress is being made, but there is still much work to be done.
Pride Month provides an opportunity to name this tension of both celebration and pain. Pride Month is celebrated annually in June to honor the LGBTQIA+ community. It commemorates the Stonewall riots of June 1969 in New York City led by queer and trans people of color, like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. Pride Month intentionally celebrates significant strides that have been made in recent years, with progress in legal recognition, public awareness, and social acceptance of LGBTQIA+ individuals and communities. Pride Month also protests how far we still have to go in advancing LGBTQIA+ rights and creating a more inclusive and equitable world for all.
The inclusion of LGBTQIA+ individuals in the church in particular is important for several reasons:
Human Dignity and Equality: Every person, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression is created in the image of God and deserves to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality. Embracing LGBTQIA+ inclusion affirms the inherent worth and value of all individuals, promoting a culture of love and acceptance within the church community. It also surfaces a responsibility to each and every member of the community to respect and care for one another, recognizing the divine spark present in each person.
Spiritual and Mental Well-Being: Exclusion and discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity can have devastating effects on the spiritual and mental well-being of LGBTQIA+ individuals. Reservoir seeks to remove shame, fear, and judgment by fostering an environment where profound belonging can occur. This is the kind of environment that best supports human growth, development and transformation. An inclusive environment prioritizes representation, uses inclusive language, acknowledges diverse relationships and family structures, and embraces a multitude of other considerations. Fundamentally, Reservoir seeks to remove all barriers to encountering the love of God and provide a safe and supportive space for LGBTQIA+ people to cultivate their spirituality without fear of rejection or condemnation.
Commitment to Upholding Reservoir’s Values: Reservoir’s values are connection, humility, action, freedom and everyone. The inclusion of LGBTQIA+ individuals aligns with these core values by challenging prejudice, combating discrimination, and advocating for the rights and dignity of all people. It reflects Jesus’ way of being on this earth, to love one another as ourselves and to welcome everyone without exception.
Healthy Community: At Reservoir, we embrace a Jesus-centered faith and remain flexible to the evolving needs of the members of Reservoir Church and broader society. Embracing diversity and inclusivity enriches the church community by broadening perspectives, fostering empathy, and embodying the values of “freedom” and “everyone” where an honest exploration of faith over conformity of belief or behavior is witnessed and experienced. By embracing LGBTQIA+ inclusion, Reservoir can embody a healthy, vibrant, diverse, and inclusive community that celebrates the unique gifts and contributions of all its members. At Reservoir, we believe the Body of Christ is called to be a reflection of God’s inclusive love for all people.
Witness: In a world where LGBTQIA+ individuals continue to face discrimination, stigma, health disparities, and violence, the church has an opportunity to be a beacon of hope, justice, and love. By actively advocating for LGBTQIA+ inclusion and justice, the church (inside and outside of a building) can bear witness to the transformative power of God’s love. A loving, liberating, and life-giving God.
Reservoir has an unwavering commitment to inclusivity and diversity. We believe that faith spaces go best for us all when they are truly shared spaces of belonging for all people. We offer seven steps toward making an inclusive church which you can read here.
LGBTQIA+ inclusion in the church is a matter of social justice and human rights and a spiritual call for all of us to continue to create and grow the beloved community we are called to be – both a vision for present reality and a future hope — a foretaste of God’s kin-dom on earth. Reservoir Church will continue to be a part of creating a world where all people can flourish and thrive with one another and with the divine.
Join Us for Our Pride Month Service on June 2nd!
On Sunday, June 2nd we will hold our Pride Services in person at 9:30 am and online at 11:00 am. This service is curated by and for the LGBTQIA+ community at Reservoir. The service will hold familiar elements such as song, scripture, communion, and prayer, as well as stories, participatory elements, and spiritual practices.
You may be aware that over the past year, Reservoir Church has played a significant role in a public organizing campaign for great housing justice in Massachusetts. Perhaps you’ve noticed that this is a very expensive area to rent or to buy a home. Sadly for me as a pastor, I’ve had conversations over the years with many of you who have wondered if the cost of housing is too high for you to want to stay in the area long-term.
Throughout the network we are in, Greater Boston Interfaith, there have been thousands of similar conversations, asking what we can do to make housing more affordable and accessible for more of us. We’ve learned about the dramatic underfunding of public housing throughout this state, often resulting in unsafe or downright deplorable living conditions. We’ve listened to the struggles of formerly incarcerated individuals to find housing or even get state IDs as they seek to rebuild a life for themselves. And we’ve confronted restrictive, discriminatory zoning laws in our communities that were set up decades ago to keep communities whiter or wealthier.
One of our pastors, Rev. Lydia Shiu, has been an instrumental leader in this work, organizing tirelessly behind the scenes and speaking in front of the state house and at other large events. Press coverage from a 1,700 person gathering Lydia co-chaired early this month can be found in The Boston Globe and the Dorchester Reporter. Over 80 of you turned out for that gathering, making us the second-best represented congregation in all of Greater Boston.
Our Faith into Action core team has also strived tirelessly to engage our church and our public representatives in this work. They’ve helped organize and run large public meetings with state elected officials, both at Reservoir and in other locations.
Here’s a short excerpt from my testimony today, before the House and Senate Ways and Means committees.
This letter written by me and other leaders in GBIO was signed, in less than a week, by 155 Massachusetts clergy – a multi-faith, multi-race, urban and suburban collective of religious leaders.
Why clergy? We are not experts on housing policy or affordability. So why hear from so many clergy, with unanimous moral clarity, on the action we need you take on housing?
Well, it’s because our clergy are teachers, caregivers, organizers, and leaders in faith communities that touch the lives of millions of Massachusetts residents. Millions of us. Over half of adults in Massachusetts engage with our state’s religious communities, somewhere between a few times a year and multiple times per week.
And one thing we are doing in our congregations is exploring a different way of being human. We’re exploring ways of being a person that aren’t defined first by our wealth, our community of residence, our home ownership status, our career field or success – or all the other things that are so important to our lives and identities in our economy.
Take my church for instance. Every week, a few hundred people interact there. We have tenured university professors, prominent physicians, C-suite leaders in major businesses and nonprofits in the area who are socializing, and worshiping side by side, eating and serving the community alongside residents of public housing, uber drivers, foster moms, disabled residents, and so on. As if those differences do not matter. How many places do we have like this?
Our religious communities are places where residents of our state find community and meaning and purpose where they are defined not by their resumes or net worth, but by their faith that they are children of God with an important place in the beloved community that we are called to create together, community where we belong, where we have just opportunities to flourish, and where we have basic goods like secure, safe, healthy housing, not because we’re lucky but because we’re human.
This experience of mattering, of belonging, and of the opportunity to make good lives for ourselves not because of our class or privilege, but because we’re part of the human family in this state – these ideals speak to the best aspirations of our country and our Commonwealth.
It’s true, friends, that we have a lot of work to do to make Greater Boston’s communities more accessible and affordable, for us and for the diverse communities we – and I believe God – would love to see flourish here.
And it’s true that church is an incredible space to be together where we aren’t defined by all the stuff our economy and our status-conscious world ranks us on, up or down. We are children of God – no one higher, no one lower. And we are in this world, and in these lives, together. We need each other. And we all matter. We all matter to ourselves. We all matter to one another. And we all matter deeply to the living God as well. Oh, and I’ve been asked to share with you that this blog was ranked as one of Boston’s 20 best Christian blogs and websites. I can’t necessarily endorse all the others, but there we are, friends.
Our Godly Play program for babies through kindergarteners is designed to welcome children into a beautiful and inviting space that is just for them. There is nothing on the shelves or in the space that is “off-limits” to them. When they enter their classroom community, they are greeted by the volunteers who know them by name and ask them curiously if they are “ready” to enter. This readiness is an invitation to check in with their little bodies and minds and get prepared to be with friends, listen to and wonder with a story, and work and play together.
One of the central aspects of the storytelling circle includes laying out tangible, tactile play materials on the ground, right at the eye level of the children. As they surround the storyteller, they hear language that naturally invites them to find the parts of the story that they are curious about or take favor to. They are never instructed, but offered lots of wondering questions, followed by an opportunity to play with the materials themselves. Sometimes, this looks like moving little figures through the desert bag as the people of God wander through this dangerous place, pretending together.
The rest of the room is set up with story shelves, open art materials shelves, and some other invitations to work with puzzles or blocks. The children can access any of the materials they would like and respond to the story of the day, or create their own work.
Another area of the room invites them to rest, listen to calming nature sounds or music, reflect on scripture or art, and quiet their bodies with sensory tools.
Elementary Kids Church
Most Sundays at Reservoir Church you can find the elementary-aged kids downstairs in the Multi-Purpose Room taking part in what we call Kids Church. I’m glad that we call it that instead of Sunday School. While I do love teaching—my training is in Elementary Education, not ministry—it’s not what’s most important when it comes to helping kids make a connection with God and with the church community. A while ago we came up with a tagline for our Kids Church program that I really love: “Worship. Wonder. Play. Find yourself in God’s story.” And that’s what we do!
Worship
We worship together every Sunday that we meet. In our context, that means that the first half of our large group time includes some songs or movements to give kids space to connect with God, and some time where we pray together. For anyone who wants to, that is! I don’t think there’s ever been a Sunday where all the kids were standing up, never mind singing. But enough always sing to make a beautiful noise together! And some weeks when I invite kids to pray or lift something up for us to pray for together, there aren’t any takers. Other weeks, though, we get to hear from enough of the kids that I start to worry we won’t ever be able to get to our story of the day!
Wonder
The central focus of our program is stories, and almost every Sunday, our morning is based around a Bible story. So I was surprised several years ago when a parent let me know that he was interested in finding a more “Bible-based” kids program for his family. On reflection, though, I think I know what he meant. Because we don’t do a lot of “teaching” about the Bible. No memorizing verses or the order of the books, and no moral lessons that we expect all the kids to absorb. Instead, we present—every week—a story from the Bible as it is, and invite the kids to wonder what it means to them at that moment. And we share our thoughts and questions in small groups. Sometimes kids don’t want to share, and that’s okay; but when I’m leading the discussion, before I let them off the hook, I sometimes remind them that I love hearing their thoughts because we’re all working to discover new, living meaning in the story for that particular moment.
The kids who do want to share say some pretty interesting stuff! I feel like every week they make connections between stories that I wouldn’t have made, bring a more literal take to the story, or a more abstract one. Sometimes they take the discussion in a completely different direction that lets us reflect on what we’re even doing in this church space together.
Earlier this year we were talking about the man and woman in the Garden of Eden who ate that fruit they weren’t supposed to eat, and a fifth-grader asked, “Isn’t this story just an excuse to say bad things about women?” Yes, historically it definitely has been that! But we can talk about what else the story might mean, and about what we can do today to react to those historical bad takes. We’ve grappled with awesome questions from “Was Jesus being mean in that story?” to “Why aren’t there dinosaurs in the Bible’s account of Creation?” And through it all, we each have the chance to understand a little more about what God is like.
Play
I love sharing stories and worship, but for lots of the kids, the best part of Kids Church comes in the last part of the morning. We call it “work time”, and it’s a chance for the kids to think about and process what we’ve talked about over the previous half hour. Sometimes that might involve illustrating a moment from the story, but to be honest, most of the time the kids want to play board games together or play with building toys. Sometimes they want to make designs with fuse beads (that’s probably the most popular activity). There are moments when I wonder if that’s ok. Shouldn’t they be doing something more… churchy? Are we wasting our valuable instructional time together?!
Of course not. Community is a huge part of the church experience, and it’s one of the three strands we focus on in Kids Church, along with Bible stories and faith practices. Besides “the Gift of Community”, playing together also gives the kids a chance to access “the Joy of Living”—something you can tell from the volume in the room during work time!
Find Yourself In God’s Story
Kids have plenty of people telling them what to do and how to think. Sometimes that’s helpful and appropriate. But in a church context, it’s not always the best way for young people to develop a life-long feeling of connection with God. In Kids Church at Reservoir, we aim to immerse kids in stories of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and give them an opportunity to see how they want to integrate those stories into their own life. They then know how to integrate themselves into what God is doing in the world (plus have some fun along the way)!
Visit Reservoir Church Today!
Our Kids Church meets almost every Sunday during the 9:30 a.m. service. We welcome everyone without exception; whatever your race, gender, sexual orientation, or background. You will always have a place here. Please feel free to drop in for a visit or connect with us!
