On the Back Side of Nowhere

In my office, gazing south to the Sierrita Moutains ten miles away, I sat struggling with pastoral reflection of the most common sort. Questions raged about numbers and growth; forward (or was it backwards?) through baptisms and disciples; about numbers and growth; over sermons, visits, and style; about numbers and growth! The longer and more deeply I pondered all of this, the more frustrated I became.
As often, living in God’s grace, I was rescued from that self-imposed Gehenna by one of the evil tools of men’s minds - the phone rang! The caller wanted to thank the church for help given in a particularly difficult time, to say that the contact with some of the members had made a great difference and that her family was doing well. Even though they no longer lived in the area, she would always recall how the people in the church family had accepted her and helped her find a place to rest, to feel cared for, and to be secure for a short time.
As I hung up and returned to the investigation of the mountains through my window, I stopped and penned a short phrase to remind me about ministry in this secluded place:
Serenity Baptist Church - an oasis for the broken, the dying, the hurting, the strange and the different.
When the personal flames rising from my self-created Hades begin to sear at my heart, those words on a piece of scrap remind me repeatedly that God often does his work in quiet, unspectacular ways.
Several years later and after a hundred repeated readings, the idea of this church, or any congregation, being an oasis (in the Old West a “way station,” or the modern super highway equivalent - a “rest stop”) has begun to be fleshed out with colors and trees, springs and buildings. There are a variety of models or theologies attempting to explain how churches minister and to describe the forms they take. My personal favorite is a title given to a large, distinguished church near a college campus in Texas. The students call it “Fort God” - something of a revelation about attitudes inside and outside the church building’s stone walls, I suppose, is captured by that phrase!
Our struggle at Serenity Baptist Church twenty miles outside of Tucson, Arizona in the midst of a scattered desert community - a ministry area defined as four-hundred square miles inhabited by about seven-thousand people, as many cattle, and twice as many jack rabbits and coyotes! - has centered in the phenomenal mobility and transient nature of the area. Families arrive here with hopes of building a new life and discover that the attending costs and distance from Tucson make life and work and recreation very difficult. So they come and a few years, or sometimes a few months later, many leave. In twenty-eight years of ministry we have seen over three-hundred baptisms and another three-hundred or so folks become part of the congregation, yet our current membership rests around one hundred-twenty, not counting resident scorpions, roadrunners and horned toads! Number reflections can be devastating here!
For me the phone call was a moment of clear recognition that this ministry community would not perform according to the stock model of a small core of believers which becomes a larger group in ever widening concentric circles, like the rippling effect of a pebble tossed in a pond. This community acts more like a small accordion, with the size at the moment related to the movement of air in the bellows (or perhaps the rushing wind of the Spirit in peoples’ hearts?).
Here is where the oasis image of congregational life has begun to make me ponder a new model, or at least a new description. After writing myself that short phrase, I realized that there was more depth in that picture than just remembering the care given to a woman in God’s grace. An oasis - a stopping place for rest, food, water, shade, directions, and perhaps moments of shared worship is precisely what this community of faith is like.
Growing from this image some of the following responses have begun to take on flesh. First is the recognition that we indeed live in something of a dry and barren land, both literally and spiritually. The desert around Tucson is certainly full of life, but for those who visit here for the first time from Washington or North Carolina, it looks very brown. We have discovered that is also the way life is experienced and perceived by many who come to live here. In the middle of this vast Altar Valley stretching forty-five miles to the Mexican border, Serenity Baptist Church has become a resting place. Our community is known as Robles Junction, but it is also called Three Points – the intersection of roads leading to three different points on the map – Tucson, Sasabe, Ajo. There is something symbolic in having two designations, neither of which is “official.” In our area, we are never really very sure about who we are! We often discover folks stopped at the church house just for water - for themselves or their cars, for food from the pantry, for a moment out of the car inside a cool sanctuary - drawn off the road by the sight of the church house rising from the desert floor.
For those who live close by, we have become a sanctuary where some of the barrenness of life can be healed. Our community is often confronted with the edge of poverty, with separated and broken families, with children existing in non-loving and unlovely families, and with men and women facing life bound by loneliness and isolation. To all of those we have tried to learn to be water and shelter, rest and hope.