At 1 a.m. on a Sunday you can often find me at a bar. The bar varies, so does the reason: a friend’s departure, a birthday celebration, a long week at the office to forget. The drink rarely varies, however, and I will clutch my gin and ice and sip it through the straw, laughing with friends and planning my exit. I have to be at church in eight hours. Slurp, laugh, check the time. My friends’ nights are open-ended but I have to be at church in — I check the time again — seven hours now.
I do get a perverse thrill from declaring, as I put down my glass, “No, I can’t stay. I have to be at church in the morning,” and seeing my friends nod knowingly while people I’ve just met look shocked. “Are you kidding?” they ask. When I assure them I’m not, sometimes they say things like, “Good for you,” or “But you seem so normal.” Rarely do they add, “Can I come too?”
As the leader of my church’s 20s-30s group, I am particularly interested in what people my age think about church. Being an unswervingly liberal, single, 25-year-old churchgoer living in Brooklyn, N.Y., can feel very lonely, which is funny, since being a Christian is supposed to be a corporate act. Bringing people together is part of Jesus’ whole deal, or as he instructs in Matthew: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” This is how we are taught to pray and to spend time with God, by sharing bread and wine and fellowship, by joining together in community. Leaving the secular fellowship of a bar on a Saturday night so I can get to church on time can feel counterintuitive. “What would Jesus do?” is the popular refrain — wouldn’t he have one more drink with the heathens?
As a way to get over my penchant for sleeping in on Sunday mornings, several years ago I decided the perfect motivator would be to make friends at church. It seemed unlikely I would ever get my college or work friends to come along; one friend insists she will “turn to stone” if she ever enters a church. I had sporadically been attending St. Luke in the Fields, an Episcopal church in Manhattan. I loved the priests, two of whom were gay, two of whom were women; I loved the music and liturgy; I loved the liberal politics. But I had trouble seeing myself there. I saw young families and old gay men; I saw middle-aged couples with no children; I saw single retirees. But I was looking for peers in age and interests. That was where I expected to find friends.
With help from one of the priests, I took over organizing a nascent small group for people in their 20s and 30s. I personally yearned for the sense of community I had once had as part of my church’s “youth group” in grade school — ski trips and talent shows and Bible studies — and began planning events with youthful optimism. We scheduled a day trip to Beacon, N.Y., to see the foliage change and visit the art gallery there, and I had high hopes for the bonding we could all do on the trip up. An hour on Metro-North seemed the perfect way for us to all make friends.
But in the end only two people signed up for the trip to Beacon, and we decided the whole trip wasn’t worth it. Forming the group presented unexpected challenges: gay, straight, single, married, partnered, homeowner, renter, parent, adoptive parent — I was trying to organize a vastly disparate group who happened to be born within 20 years of each other. Families with small children weren’t able to make the trip to Beacon, or even to sit around at a bar. The younger members weren’t interested in getting up early on a Saturday morning to do a service project.
Not wanting to give up in defeat, we varied events to include service projects and brunches but also ones that folded us into the ongoing life of the parish, like cleaning up after a dinner. As my new church friends and I began to define what the group could be — less a circle of close friends than a support for anyone in that age group who wants to go to church but might not know how to do it alone — I began to let go of my own desire to find other people “like me” in communal worship. As I looked around church last Sunday and saw the same familiar faces from my first visits to St. Luke’s, I realized these were not only my friends but my spiritual family in the city. I may still struggle to get out of bed on a Sunday morning, but the effort feels far less lonely.
Julia Stroud is a member of the vestry at St. Luke in the Fields and will begin studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in the fall.
I do get a perverse thrill from declaring, as I put down my glass, “No, I can’t stay. I have to be at church in the morning,” and seeing my friends nod knowingly while people I’ve just met look shocked. “Are you kidding?” they ask. When I assure them I’m not, sometimes they say things like, “Good for you,” or “But you seem so normal.” Rarely do they add, “Can I come too?”
As the leader of my church’s 20s-30s group, I am particularly interested in what people my age think about church. Being an unswervingly liberal, single, 25-year-old churchgoer living in Brooklyn, N.Y., can feel very lonely, which is funny, since being a Christian is supposed to be a corporate act. Bringing people together is part of Jesus’ whole deal, or as he instructs in Matthew: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” This is how we are taught to pray and to spend time with God, by sharing bread and wine and fellowship, by joining together in community. Leaving the secular fellowship of a bar on a Saturday night so I can get to church on time can feel counterintuitive. “What would Jesus do?” is the popular refrain — wouldn’t he have one more drink with the heathens?
As a way to get over my penchant for sleeping in on Sunday mornings, several years ago I decided the perfect motivator would be to make friends at church. It seemed unlikely I would ever get my college or work friends to come along; one friend insists she will “turn to stone” if she ever enters a church. I had sporadically been attending St. Luke in the Fields, an Episcopal church in Manhattan. I loved the priests, two of whom were gay, two of whom were women; I loved the music and liturgy; I loved the liberal politics. But I had trouble seeing myself there. I saw young families and old gay men; I saw middle-aged couples with no children; I saw single retirees. But I was looking for peers in age and interests. That was where I expected to find friends.
With help from one of the priests, I took over organizing a nascent small group for people in their 20s and 30s. I personally yearned for the sense of community I had once had as part of my church’s “youth group” in grade school — ski trips and talent shows and Bible studies — and began planning events with youthful optimism. We scheduled a day trip to Beacon, N.Y., to see the foliage change and visit the art gallery there, and I had high hopes for the bonding we could all do on the trip up. An hour on Metro-North seemed the perfect way for us to all make friends.
But in the end only two people signed up for the trip to Beacon, and we decided the whole trip wasn’t worth it. Forming the group presented unexpected challenges: gay, straight, single, married, partnered, homeowner, renter, parent, adoptive parent — I was trying to organize a vastly disparate group who happened to be born within 20 years of each other. Families with small children weren’t able to make the trip to Beacon, or even to sit around at a bar. The younger members weren’t interested in getting up early on a Saturday morning to do a service project.
Not wanting to give up in defeat, we varied events to include service projects and brunches but also ones that folded us into the ongoing life of the parish, like cleaning up after a dinner. As my new church friends and I began to define what the group could be — less a circle of close friends than a support for anyone in that age group who wants to go to church but might not know how to do it alone — I began to let go of my own desire to find other people “like me” in communal worship. As I looked around church last Sunday and saw the same familiar faces from my first visits to St. Luke’s, I realized these were not only my friends but my spiritual family in the city. I may still struggle to get out of bed on a Sunday morning, but the effort feels far less lonely.
Julia Stroud is a member of the vestry at St. Luke in the Fields and will begin studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in the fall.
