[From The Church Next Door: Local Christians Face America’s New Religious Diversity, draft manuscript by Dr. Paul D. Numrich. Please do not quote or cite without author’s permission.]

Chapter 6: Gathering around the Table of Fellowship: Lake Street Church

[figure approx. here: photo of Buddhist monks blessing communion elements, with date]

The worship service on Sunday, October 6, 2002, began with an invocation by an Aztec dance group asking a blessing from the Four Directions of the Earth. One after another, local representatives of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and other religious traditions shared something appropriate to the interfaith theme of the service, Building Community: Repairing the World Together. A Hindu swami intoned the sacred Sanskrit syllable Om, Buddhist monks chanted ancient Pali scriptures, a Muslim imam recited passages from the Qur’an, Jains danced the Dance of Forgiveness to mend the violence of the world, and an adherent of Sant Mat, a spiritual tradition with historical roots in northwest India, offered a guided meditation on the sources of inner peace and care for others. Christian elements were interspersed throughout the service, such as the congregational hymn, “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” and the choir’s anthem, “Prayer of St. Francis.” The pastor of the church, Rev. Robert Thompson, closed the service by leading the people in a Commitment to Peace. The interfaith movement is “bubbling up” all over the world, he proclaimed, approvingly.

This annual interfaith worship service epitomizes the approach to religious diversity at Lake Street Church of Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. In turn, Lake Street Church and its pastor epitomize key aspects of the modern interfaith movement—and key challenges for its Christian participants.

Lake Street Church held its first interfaith service in 1996, choosing World Wide Communion Sunday, an ecumenical Protestant observance held annually on the first Sunday in October. The idea of opening the Christian ritual of Communion to non-Christian participants strikes some as daring, others as inappropriate, perhaps even blasphemous.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported on the 1998 service at Lake Street Church in an article entitled “Minister sets communion table for all,” citing Rev. Thompson’s justification for the event. Rev. Thompson wondered how Christians could exclude non-Christians from experiencing Christ’s presence in the celebration of Communion. “That is a direct contradiction of what we see in Jesus, who was present with everybody, regardless of their standing in society,” he asserted, continuing: “My responsibility is to cultivate an atmosphere that celebrates a kind of respect for everyone’s tradition. And the way I know how to do that is to take down barriers that existed in the past.”

Groups participating in World Wide Community Sunday service, Lake Street Church, October 6, 2002 (the religious tradition of each is noted, along with a Web site for more information where available):

· Beth Emet - The Free Synagogue, Judaism, www.bethemet.org

· Buddhist Council of the Midwest, Buddhism, www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/5352/midwest_buddhist_council.html

· Chinmaya Mission Chicago, Hinduism, www.chinmaya-chicago.org

· Grupo Ehecatl, Aztec indigenous spirituality

· Jain Society of Metropolitan Chicago, Jainism, www.jsmconline.org/jsmc/home.asp

· Muslim Community Center, Islam, www.mccchicago.org

· Nartan School of Dance, Jainism, www.angelfire.com/il3/nartan

· Pachamama Alliance, eco-religion of indigenous peoples, www.pachamama.org

· Science of Spirituality, Sant Mat tradition, www.sos.org

· Sikh Religious Society of Chicago, Sikhism, www.pcschicago.org/directions/srs.htm

· Soundvision Foundation, Islam, www.soundvision.com

We interviewed Rev. Thompson not long after the 2002 interfaith service described above. He has changed the name to World Wide Community Sunday but the philosophy behind the event remains the same. Lake Street Church does not hold to any mind-set that would distinguish between Christians and non-Christians, Rev. Thompson explained. At Lake Street Church, religious boundaries are loosely drawn and the congregation is “intentionally ambiguous” about its own identity. The more tightly drawn the boundaries, the more exclusive the congregation, Rev. Thompson observed.

Lake Street Church (est. 1858) is officially affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA denomination but recently changed its name from First Baptist Church in order to avoid scaring away people for whom the word “Baptist” carries negative connotations. The congregation has formed a committee to explore possible new affiliations, such as the Unitarian Universalist Association, the United Church of Christ, the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers), the Association of Unity Churches, or even a Buddhist connection of some kind, which makes sense considering the congregation’s strong ties to local Buddhist groups (see below). Whatever direction they take, Rev. Thompson feels that his congregation’s spiritual vitality requires “a larger vessel” than the American Baptists provide.

Rev. Thompson sees the World Wide Community Sunday celebration as a way to be as “radically inclusive” as Jesus was in his own table fellowship. Jesus ate and drank with everyone, creating a scandalous feast under the banner of the kingdom of God, welcoming those whom others would exclude from the kingdom. The church should be about relationships, Rev. Thompson asserted. “It’s more important to be related than right.”

He offered another metaphor for the church’s relationship to a diverse religious world:

Truth is like a precious jewel. Christians see some of the jewel’s facets from their particular vantage point and depending on the light available to them. Adherents of other religions see other facets with their lights. The more collective light we shed on the jewel, the more truth we can all apprehend, he believes.

When we interviewed him, Rev. Thompson was chair of the board of trustees of the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, a major interfaith organization headquartered in Chicago (see Introduction). A nun from the Brahma Kumaris spiritual group nominated him to the board a few years earlier, but when he was asked to take over the position of chair, his first thought was that they needed a woman or a person of color. “They don’t need another white, Christian guy,” he recalled saying to himself. Upon reflection, however, he was happy to take the position since it continued and extended the interfaith work he had been involved with for several years, including a local homeless shelter.

In a sense, Lake Street Church is a miniature parliament of religions, providing a venue for dialogue and cooperation among a variety of local religious groups. The church has relationships with a Reform Jewish synagogue, a Baha’i spiritual assembly, a Sufi prayer group that meets at a well-known Islamic bookstore in Chicago, and a Sunni Islamic day school in an adjacent suburb with which the congregation is trying to organize a joint children’s play group.

Perhaps the strongest connection is with local Buddhists, including several meditation centers in the Evanston area. When Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, son of Shambhala International’s founder, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, came to Chicago for a series of talks in 2003, he packed the sanctuary at Lake Street Church for a lecture on meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The church regularly supports the work of Tibet Center, a local cultural organization with close ties to the Dalai Lama. The Buddhist Council of the Midwest, a regional umbrella group representing dozens of Buddhist temples and meditation centers, often holds its annual International Visakha celebration at Lake Street Church. Heartland Sangha, a group that combines the Zen and Jodo Shinshu Buddhist traditions, has held its services at Lake Street Church for several years. The church also co-sponsors an annual weekend seminar called Living Buddha / Living Christ with Lakeside Buddha Sangha, a Buddhist center that follows the teachings of the well-known Vietnamese Zen teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh.

Several members of the church self-identify as Buddhists, Lise (pronounced “Lisa”) Jacobson being one. After attending the International Visakha at the church in 1999, she joined both Lakeside Buddha Sangha and Lake Street Church. Today she serves as co-chair of the interfaith committee at the church. She calls Rev. Thompson the “guiding light” of the congregation’s philosophy and interfaith activities, someone who possesses an almost “mystical” understanding of how individuals approach the divine. But the church is not merely an extension of its pastor in these matters, Lise clarified. There is a hunger for understanding at Lake Street Church, she explained, and much of the programming about non-Christian religions comes from the members themselves. Speaking for the interfaith committee, “We just try to give people what they want.”

Lise lightheartedly offered the phrase “chaotic exploration” to sum up Lake Street Church’s approach to religious diversity. “There is so much going on,” she elaborated, “so many different opinions. The church supports the diverse personal journeys of its members. We don’t require that everyone take the same journey. We manage to support many different journeys.” She attends Lake Street Church because she has Christian roots that she reveres despite having “issues” growing up. “It had nothing to do with Christ,” she explained, “but the church.” She said she now has an attachment to both the Christ and the Buddha. “Are they gods?” she asked. “No. Do I worship them? No. If the Christian police stopped me and asked if Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, I’m in trouble.” But Lake Street Church has no Christian police, she told us.

Lise confessed to us that she acted a bit “ornery” at the last World Wide Community Sunday service. She stood up twice when the leaders asked people to identify their religion, once as a Christian, next as a Buddhist. “If there were a census, I couldn’t pick one,” she explained. Then she reflected on the role of community in religious identities. She said she had never thought about community until the last few years, but “people need community.” She is thankful to have two religious communities supporting her in her spiritual path. “We should stop romanticizing individualism.”

Lake Street Church offers an array of spiritual options for inquiring individuals, all within the context of a supportive community. “Spiritual seekers, regardless of racial, sexual or religious orientations, are all welcome!” proclaims a church brochure, noting that more than 16 religious traditions are represented in the congregation. For inquirers potentially turned off by the church’s Baptist affiliation, the brochure clarifies: “Lake Street Church intentionally seeks to embody the best of the free-church tradition by encouraging individuals to forge a spiritual path based upon the intuitive wisdom of their own experience. We seek therefore to support individuals in their uniquely personal spiritual quests. Our spiritual community is not held together by belief in a particular doctrine but by the shared experience of our innate connection in and through the Divine.”

Excerpt from Lake Street Church brochure, a quotation from Phil Jenks, World Council of Churches official and an American Baptist:

When a group of people, representing a variety of denominations, traditions, interpretations and convictions, stand arm in arm prayerfully, God is in the center. Differences are understood. Similarities are softly evident. Community happens. The church has become.

At the time of our research, in addition to the usual Christian programming one would expect of any church, Lake Street Church offered the following programs and activities (the first three have been discussed above): World Wide Community Sunday, meditation lecture by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Living Buddha / Living Christ seminar, A-Little-Bit-of-Tibet (program on Tibetan culture and religion), Awakening Our Cosmic Selves (workshop on Buddhist meditation), Meditation Satsang (series on Hindu meditation), the Yoga Studio, Light of the Moon Society (women’s spirituality group), Be-a-Muslim-for-Half-a-Day, and Bhagavad Gita Discussion Group. We attended two sessions of the Bhagavad Gita group, which meets during the adult Sunday school hour.

The group uses the commentary, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living by Sri Eknath Easwaran, as a guide to understanding this Hindu scripture as well as a catalyst for open discussion about a wide range of topics. In our first visit, the group considered two passages from the Gita. The first passage reads: “The spiritually minded, who eat in the spirit of service, are freed from all their sins; but the selfish, who prepare food for their own satisfaction, eat sin.” Discussion centered around various spiritual paths, one person drawing a connection between the Gita passage and the Buddha’s experimentation with ascetic fasting, which the Buddha eventually abandoned since that lifestyle could not lead to enlightenment. The group also engaged in a lively debate about the spiritual merits of vegetarianism. Some decried the hypocrisy of being a vegetarian while remaining violent in other ways through thought, word, or deed. A couple of people shared their personal struggles with cravings for various kinds of food that may be spiritually impure.

The second passage from the Gita continued the food theme: “Living creatures are nourished by food, and food is nourished by the rain; this rain is the water of life that comes from selfless action, worship, and service.” Here the discussion focused on interior change and how it might change the world. There is a spiritual ripple effect, from oneself to those immediately around oneself to the whole world. Separateness is an illusion—we influence each other and all things.

The conversation during this session made no reference to anything specifically Christian. Drawing connections between the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible, or between Hinduism and Christianity, is not required of the class. The conversation during the second session we visited did make a few such connections, however. For instance, the group compared the Christian notion of being “born again” with the “twice-born” status of Hindu brahmins, the spiritual leaders of Hinduism. Also, the group thought the Hindu story of the god Krishna filling his flute with divine love and joy dovetailed nicely with 1 Corinthians 13, where the apostle Paul likens tongue-speaking without love to the sound of noisy instruments.

We interviewed Al Kost, who leads the Bhagavad Gita discussion group. Al was raised Jewish but now considers himself primarily a follower of Sri Eknath Easwaran, a spiritual teacher from south India and author of the Gita commentary used by the discussion group. For Al, “Jesus was a messenger, not the message. But people are confused.” Christians today have lost sight of Jesus’ basic message of “loving thy neighbor,” becoming too caught up in the Bible and supposedly correct practices. Christians should not respond to religious diversity by proselytizing. Rather, they should welcome diversity into their churches, as does Lake Street Church and as Jesus welcomed the diversity around him in love. “God is love,” Al offered. “If we love each other, it’s all going to be fine. Though we have our share of problems, we try to be a loving community.”

In Al’s opinion, the most important issue facing Lake Street Church is how to embrace conservative Christians in love. The church has had far less success in reaching out to other churches than to non-Christian groups, and some of its own members sometimes feel uncomfortable with the extensive non-Christian programming at the church. We asked the moderator of the church, Patricia Ashbrook, for her thoughts on this issue.

Pat joined Lake Street Church in 1983. She describes herself as both a “traditional Baptist” and a “progressive Baptist,” whose husband, father, uncle, and brother were all Baptist ministers. But she made sure we understood: “I don’t like the Southern Baptists,” who are far too conservative for her tastes. She believes strongly in the fundamental Baptist principles of individual freedom of belief and congregational autonomy, which Lake Street Church represents. She confessed that she does not always feel spiritually fed at Lake Street Church, preferring more traditional expressions Christianity, but the typical Sunday morning worship experience still “holds together” well enough as a Protestant service in her estimation. However, if the church ever swings completely away from Christianity, she told us, “I couldn’t stay.”

Pat described Lake Street Church as “inclusive, almost to an extreme.” The congregation welcomes diversity in religious beliefs, sexual lifestyles, and racial/ethnic identities (although it is a predominantly white congregation), but it still manages to maintain a healthy equilibrium. “We have tensions,” she admitted, “but we’re able to deal with them.” The variety is “like yeast—it brings life to the church. I don’t always agree with the views, but it feels very good for us.” She illustrated her point by referring to the church’s heavy emphasis on Buddhism. She loves a lot of Buddhist sayings and appreciates how Buddhist meditation might be a centering influence for many members (her late husband meditated). “But it’s not for me. I center myself in different ways,” she said. She thinks congregational affiliation with a Buddhist group does not make sense. “We must be open and understanding of different faiths, but we can still be grounded in Christianity.”

When we asked Rev. Thompson whether he sensed any serious disagreements within the congregation over its interfaith inclusiveness, he gave us a look familiar to anyone who knows churches and their propensity for divisiveness on any number of issues. “It’s a church,” he said simply. He acknowledged a minority but persistent refrain of discomfort within the membership, usually articulated in the question, “Are we still a Christian church?” But, he asserted, “I really think what we’re doing represents the future of liberal Protestantism. We’ve got to fulfill the promise of diversity. Spiritual imperialism creates a world of greater conflict. We don’t need more monologue, we need dialogue.”

For More Information

Lake Street Church’s contact information is 607 Lake Street, Evanston, Illinois 60201, phone 847-864-2181, Web site www.lakestreet.org. The congregation is currently affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA denomination (www.abc-usa.org) but is considering several alternative affiliations, the two most amenable being the Unitarian Universalist Association (www.uua.org) and the Buddhist Council of the Midwest (www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/5352/midwest_buddhist_council.html).

World Communion Sunday, formerly called World Wide Communion Sunday, originated in Presbyterian circles in 1936 but is observed by a number of Protestant denominations today. Participating denominations and congregations share the Eucharist or Communion as a sign of Christian unity. See the Web site of the National Council of Churches, www.ncccusa.org/ecmin/worldcommunionsunday2002old.html.

For Discussion

1. Would (or does) your church observe World Communion Sunday, an ecumenical Protestant celebration on the first Sunday of October (see above under “For More Information”)? Would (or does) your church celebrate an interfaith worship event similar to Lake Street Church’s World Wide Community Sunday? How do you feel about Christians of various denominations sharing the Eucharist or Communion? How do you feel about inviting non-Christians to participate in the Eucharist or Communion?
2. Do you agree with Rev. Thompson that excluding non-Christians from the Eucharist or Communion is “a direct contradiction of what we see in Jesus, who was present with everybody, regardless of their standing in society”? What other aspects of Jesus’ life and teachings might guide Christians in their relationships with non-Christians? Can you cite biblical passages that stand in tension with Lake Street Church’s approach to non-Christians?
3. Peruse the Web sites of selected religious groups listed in the first sidebar of this chapter. These groups participated in a World Wide Community Sunday service at Lake Street Church. Which groups seem closest to Christianity in beliefs and practices? Which seem furthest removed from Christianity? If you were asked to visit one of these groups in order to learn more about it, which would you feel most comfortable visiting, which least comfortable, and why?
4. How well do you think Lake Street Church deals with its internal diversity of religious perspectives? Is it possible for “conservative” or “traditional” Christians to feel comfortable in a congregation with such an open-ended definition of what it means to be a Christian?
5. Should Lake Street Church drop its affiliation with the American Baptist Churches USA denomination? Should the American Baptist Churches USA drop Lake Street Church from its roster of affiliated congregations? If your congregation comes out of the Baptist heritage, how do you judge Lake Street Church’s interpretation of fundamental Baptist principles? Whether or not your congregation is Baptist, would your denomination accept Lake Street Church as an affiliated congregation?
6. Revisit the final paragraph of this chapter. Is Lake Street Church a Christian church? Does it represent the future of liberal Protestantism? How important is liberal Protestantism to Christianity as a whole? How important is liberal Protestantism to non-Christian religions?

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