He was standing off to the side again. I couldn’t tell if he was waiting to talk to me or just waiting, in the awkward part of the after-service coffee dance where your conversational partner has moved on and you’re looking to see if you can catch someone else or if it’s time to exit stage left.
I grabbed a snack and walked up. We exchanged pleasantries, and then he smiled and said, “So, next Sunday is your last?”
I smiled. “Yeah! Kind of crazy to believe. I remember you so clearly from when I first started coming, and now—”
“Yeah,” he smiled. “Like you wrote in that article.”
I stopped. “You read that?”
“Yeah it was,” he paused, “the first church I chose, or something like that.”
Before I began writing for the post calvin, I had a personal blog where I would post long, unedited, overly personal pieces—so basically exactly what I do these days. Jennifer Holberg reached out to me my senior year and asked if I would be interested in guest posting for her spot on the Reformed Journal blog. I wrote two posts: one that was so forgettable I honestly believed I had only written one guest post, and “The First Church I’ve Chosen for Myself.”
It’s not a particularly good piece of writing, but it is one I think about often these days, as after seven years I am leaving that church. Unlike most of the departures that have happened recently, I am not leaving due to theological differences or the general CRC kerfuffle. Like most departures, it has been difficult.
I quipped to a mentor of mine that leaving has felt like ripping my heart out. I felt it when I broke the news over the phone to one of the youth, whom I worked beside through leadership training last year and who has been voluntarily driving themselves to church, attending when even their family doesn’t come. “Are you going to be in Grand Rapids next year?” they texted immediately afterwards. “I want you at my graduation.”
I felt it when I finished leading worship for the final time, putting away the tambourine that I always inevitably pull out in vain hopes of keeping my team on beat. I felt it as I talked the new ministry director through the social landscape of youth group and yearly events, realizing that I won’t be directing them through another Ash Wednesday. I felt it as the days to August 10th dwindled, as more people came up to me and said, “Heard you got a new job!” or “Heard you’re leaving soon!”
I felt it as my shepherding elder looked at me and said, “There’s no church like Creston. Truly, there’s not.”
During a recent Sunday service, my pastor did a talkback style message where she and his husband worked through Romans 5:1–5 and then asked for congregants’ thoughts. The first person reflected how people tend to view the “perseverance produces character, and character produces hope” verse individually, how we ourselves persevere, but that the early church would have seen it through the lens of community.
I have thousands of God Stories from Creston—ones that are mine and ones from my people. I have my sales pitch on why I invested so much of my time, my energy, my love, my money into that church on the corner of Buffalo and Spencer. It is likely the only reason I am at all engaged with Christianity today. But what I realized that Sunday, the weekend I was wrestling with my decision to stay or to go, is the most profound impact Creston has had on me is how it has shifted my viewpoint and values sharply towards community.
Creston’s culture is that everyone is welcome in this community, and everyone works to make this community happen. It’s the thing that hooked me so deeply; it’s the thing that makes it so hard to leave. I look at my faith differently, understanding how I need other people around me to grow. I look at my job differently, wondering how I can teach these young adults how to be well with each other online and offline. I look at my life differently, realizing that wherever I plant myself, I am in service to the people around me.
Thank you, Creston—faithful for a hundred years, faithful to me, faithful beyond me. What a joy it was, to be so deeply loved and deeply changed.
Photo credit to Creston Church website. Title inspiration from Katie Van Zanen’s “Thank You, Neland Ave.”
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.
