“Unused creativity is not benign” I started off my poem on Thursday with this quote from Brene Brown. Neither, it seems, is an unresponded to call from God.

It is four in the morning, and I should be sleeping. I woke yesterday at four to drive down to Virginia for the #MissionalVoices conference. Too much driving, so much to think about, too little sleep.

I am a social media manager at a Federally Qualified Health Center. I am not one of the eighty seminarians at this conference. I am not one of the many priests or other church leaders at the conference.

I had all the standard fears and anxieties I have going to a conference as an outsider, as an other, as someone who is not already well versed in the topic. Going to a conference at a seminary is not something most of my co-workers would ever think of doing, but here I am, and it feels like someone sent me.

“Unused creativity is not benign”. It is something I’ve been struggling with all my life. After dropping out of college, giving up my plans of being a priest or professor, I moved to New York City to become a poet, and instead, spent the follow decades making a living, supporting myself, and then my wife and family. I love them dearly, but I had a secret love, writing, and so at all of those events and a proper life, the gatherings with co-workers, I pined for this other love as well.

A year and a half ago, I somehow got connected with the poetry efforts in the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. They have a Diocesan Poet, something it seems more dioceses should have. I started writing again. I attended a poetry conference, at of all places, Yale Divinity School. The signup form asked what sort of church leader I was, Rector, Music Director, Director of Christian Education, those sort of things, and “other”. They did not have “Aspiring social media bivocational missional priest”, not that I would have understood what that means, or identified that way, yet. So I registered as “other” and went, embracing this otherness, and encountered, not only my secret love of writing, but also the source of love, who is called by the name of Love, and Love said, “I’ve been waiting”.

That was eleven months ago. Next month, a parish discernment committee will have its last meeting with me and then submit a report to the diocese on their thoughts about what should happen next with me on my journey.

As I sought discernment, I stumbled across new a word for me, “missiology”. Then, I heard about a conference at Virginia Theological Seminary, Missional Voices, and here I am. It started off with a video welcome from Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, who talked, as he often does, about the “Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement”. Yup. Here I am at Jesus Movement Camp.

I chose this phrase as a combination of Bishop Curry’s comments about the “Jesus Movement” and the 2006 film “Jesus Camp”. Living in a liberal secular community, “Jesus Camp” represents all that is wrong with Christianity. To borrow from the Wikipedia article about Jesus Camp, “At the camp, Fischer stresses the need for children to purify themselves in order to be part of the ‘army of God’”

I don’t want to feed into “us/them” thinking by focusing on what I believe is wrong with “Jesus Camp”, but if I were to try and put this conference into that framework, I would say that instead of focusing on ritual purification, we are focusing on God’s love for us, something that is very personal and palpable to me, and on the calling to go out and share that love with our neighbors.

On a certain level, these words may sound very similar to my conservative Christian friends. The difference, it seems, is how we show that love. Some people seem to believe it is all about telling others that God loves them, and they will go to hell if they don’t accept God’s love.

This conference is about showing our neighbors that God loves them. It is about more than just a symbolic washing of feet on Maundy Thursday, it is about washing the clothes of homeless people while listening to them and learning what it really means to be a neighbor. It is about gathering in communities, artistic, intentional, worshipful, that provide food, housing, and fellowship to those around us.

It is about stepping out in faith and fear in failing churches, not to maintain a dying institution, but to show the love of a living God.

On the way down, I recorded some of my thoughts about the road trip. I listened to modern American Poetry. I listened to some essays by Barbara Kingsolver that she wrote after 9/11. Back home, friends gathered to protest a campaign rally for a candidate who wants to make America great again, not by loving our neighbors, but by being tough and building higher walls.

Today, when over $100 per human across the earth is spent advertising mammon, when our consumption of natural resources causes serious problems for people around the global, the need for God’s redeeming love is as great as ever, and learning to show that love, learning to help others learn how to show that love is important work, is crucial work, with all the nuances of “Crucial” fully intended.

After the conference, I will head back to Connecticut. I will talk with my priest, the discernment committee will continue to meet, and I will talk with my bishop and the Commission on Ministry.

One thing that I will recommend is that next year, the Episcopal Church in Connecticut have viewing parties of Missional Voices, similar to what we did for the Trinity Institute, that those in the process of seeking discernment and postulants be strongly encouraged to attend and have deep discussions about what it means to have missional voices heard in Connecticut.

I do not know where all of this will lead, but this much I know. God loves me, more deeply than I can understand, in spite of all my failings. God wants me to show that love to my neighbors, especially to the others, those that our political candidates seek to blame or exclude. This is what the Jesus Movement is about for me right now, and why Missional Voices, a Jesus Movement Camp, is so important.