September 23rdSitting in the Circle
I was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, and I followed in my great-grandfather's footsteps by becoming a pastor in the Baptist tradition. I worked in small evangelical churches as a pastor for 17 years. After leaving my church in 2023, I took time off to "howl in the woods and lick my wounds".
My story, however, like many stories, keeps unfolding and the plot keeps shifting.... I was given the chance to research Anabaptist hermeneutics for a sermon series on how Mennonites read the Bible. When I put Mennonites, Evangelicals, and Catholics together to highlight the differences, I realized that I'm a Mennonite! Mennonites hang a lot on Matthew 18 (where two or three are gathered) to teach that God is primarily encountered through the gathered people. I read "Reading the Bible on Turtle Island" by Chris Hoklotubbe this summer and we considered the difference between a talking circle and a stadium with everyone's eyes set on the guy at the front. A talking circle imagines the community through an asset-based lens (as if there could be troves of wisdom within each person that we get to discover together; leaving each gathering wealthier and wealthier). A stadium approach assumes deficiency within the people and assigns a doctor to heal their hearts each week until they hopefully become better. Do the people gather because they need more Jesus? Or do we gather to bear witness to the way the *whole earth* is already filled with Glory? Call me crazy, but I’m sitting in the circle from here on out. And keep the lights on!
I began as lead pastor on September 1st, and on September 13th, we had our "Gathering Sunday" at Trinity Mennonite, and we heard an assortment of voices, of all ages and backgrounds. Two Mennonite Brethren visitors who were on holiday from Germany joined us and they were decked out in traditional attire. I was happy to greet them and resigned to the probability of them walking out when they saw that the pastor was a Nikayla and not virtually anyone else. But the beaming smiles never left their faces from beginning to end. They were glad to find a home away from home in a familiar looking circle and it just didn’t matter who I am because I’m not the star of the show. I know this, because the projector didn’t work and we had no PowerPoint but we sang together with hymnals and prayed together and ate amazing food together before we all went home late in the afternoon. I left feeling as if I had more of me than I had when I arrived and so excited to be in the circle again.
Stephen T. Berg wrote that,
"In the daylight God disappears,
running here and there,
contending with the desires of people,
shaking with laughter,
then weeping.
Which recalls to her this singular concern:
to keep dancing her crazy cosmic conga
and coax all the broken circles back to love."
No matter how many twists and turns my story has, I keep encountering this God who wiggles without shame for having no plan other than this conga (with Indigenous joy and transjoy and neurodiverse joy and more-than-human joy at the front of the line!)
Within all of us there seems to be a tender sadness because we've not yet been allowed to dance that cosmic conga - for fear that we don't deserve to wiggle with joy without being laughed at or hated. But somehow, I'm installed as Lead Pastor of Trinity Mennonite Church this Sunday. You can't know my story and hear that I've made it to this beautiful congregation at this point in Canadian history, as wildly Nikayla as I now am, and not at least hear the drum beat faintly and feel some kind of coaxing toward hope.
It's getting cold and winter is in the air. But the green of next summer is already here, waiting in the roots. I do not know who planted the seeds that made the food I get to eat today, and I wasn't there when the gardeners of the past trusted the soil with their hopes and dreams for a future they wouldn't see, but I know they weren't afraid of the mud and the muck and that they must have loved us very much. They were probably Mennonite.
