Reimagining Church

Reimagining Church, an initiative of Yale Divinity School, equips churches to identify present needs and opportunities in their ministries. Funded by the Lily Endowment as part of the Thriving Congregations Initiative, the project pairs YDS students in their final year of study with a local congregation to discern together "New Models for the 21st Century."

The excerpt below, taken from "Embracing Possibility," was written as an opening reflection for the program. Additional reflections can be viewed here: How will we be together?; "It was a seriously lonely time"; and Waiting to be sown.

We live in a moment of possibility. For nearly two full years, COVID-19 has shaped our reality. At first, like many, I thought of Pandemic Time as something of a collective pause: to examine social structures, to surface and tell untold histories, to reckon with worn out ways of being. But in the many long-yet-exceptionally-swift months since, I have become more acutely aware of the ways in which we are actively undergoing transformation. Life-as-once-known isn’t just on “pause”—it is a life-once-was. The way we were then is not the way we are now. And our communities are not the same places they were in pre-pandemic times. How we gather and how we share meals and how we sustain connection and how we find belonging and how we hold ourselves and one another together amid the constant existential swirling: it’s all just… different. But perhaps, just maybe, this can be a good thing. Because if we're honest, who we have been as a nation, as Church, as neighbors, has rarely ever lived up to aspirations. While the pandemic has presented new challenges and dynamically shaped the substance of our lives, in many ways it has merely exposed threadbare patches in our social fabric in need of some long overdue mending. In all of this, now, here in this evolving historical moment, the Church has a critical task: Can we sing the Lord’s song—even here? What does proclamation of Christ’s unbinding love look like in this 21st century post-pandemic reality?