GALLERY I Curating Church: Lessons from a Misfit Liturgical Community

The how of selecting the artworks and other materials and of mounting the exhibition as an arena of experience is as crucial as what it is for and why it is consequential.

— Terry Smith

Eight hundred and thirty-three days. That's how long we were blessed to sustain a liturgical experiment we called rechurch. It was a time of discovery, creativity, headaches, surprises, and joy. From November 4, 2007 until February 14, 2010, a community of worship and grace thrived. Looking back, I marvel at how rechurch grew into a space where it was okay to take big risks. I laugh at how comfortable we became with failure. It was and remains one of the most meaningful, life-giving worship communities in which I've ever participated. Requiescat in pace.

In this Gallery, I wish to articulate for you as accurately as I'm able the rechurch milieu. But in some ways, this is a misnomer: rechurch was never a thing that one could capture in a sentence or two. We never allowed it to retain a proper name — hence its lowercased spelling. Its evanescence and its resistance to taking itself too seriously were intrinsic to its DNA. Our motto, New Ideas Welcome, was also a kind of mission statement. Thus, rechurch was always becoming something else, something more than it was, and that's why so many people loved it ... and feared it.

Background

As I mentioned in the Preface, the theological, liturgical, and aesthetic beginnings of rechurch started in an altogether different environment. Like most major cities, Atlanta plays host to a variety of people. Different folks congregate into disparate communities that take on their own look and feel. The Little Five Points neighborhood and the Buckhead neighborhood are about as different from each other as you could imagine.

Little Five Points is known for its eclectic, countercultural flare. Its current cultural panache took shape during the Vietnam War, when droves of hippies flocked to the recently impoverished neighborhood. Its economic condition was partly due to white flight and partly to a proposed interstate route right through the heart of the borough. This construction plan never materialized, but it nevertheless altered the borough's destiny. Many of those hippies are now doctors, professors, and lawyers and still live in the neighborhood in renovated Victorian homes.

Except for a Starbucks that managed to creep in (despite months of vitriol and protests from its neighbors), Little Five Points has managed to resist commercialization. It is home to two indie bookstores, three indie record stores, several high-end thrift stores, a natural food store, and numerous locally owned and operated restaurants and pubs.

Having worked in Little Five Points for several years to form the Trinitas community, I was then invited to join the staff of Wieuca Road Baptist Church (WRBC) as the Coordinator of Missional Community and Alternative Worship. My charge was simple: to help WRBC forge meaningful connections with its neighbors in Buckhead and beyond and to create a worship venue that would facilitate WRBC's new missional trajectory.

Buckhead is one of the most posh and affluent neighborhoods in Atlanta, and WRBC is situated right at its jugular. Located at the corner of Wieuca Road and Peachtree Road, which is Atlanta's most well-known artery, WRBC is surrounded by skyscrapers and high-end retailers like Tiffany & Co., Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Giorgio Armani. The church is right across the street from Phipps Plaza, the swankiest mall in Atlanta, and less than a mile from Lenox Mall. If Atlantean neoliberal capitalism were a hurricane, WRBC rested in its eye.

My prejudices aside, I jumped right in to my new call at WRBC. I started by chatting up folks at the coffee shops, pubs, and restaurants near the church and quickly discovered that many of my assumptions about the kind of people who lived in Buckhead were false. Even as lots of its inhabitants were upper-middle class, working in business, medicine, and law, many were also school teachers and accountants and cooks. What is more, I learned that even as the aesthetics and architecture of Buckhead were vastly different from those in Little Five Points, many of its inhabitants shared an epistemological sensibility that was quite similar. In other words, even as the Buckhead and Little Five Points residents looked different, they thought in similar ways.

WRBC was once a flagship church in the Southern Baptist Convention. Then the church had boasted a membership of over five thousand people. Unfortunately, because of demographic and cultural shifts — exacerbated by decades of infighting — the congregation had dwindled to under one thousand when I joined the staff in 2006. To make the church more appealing to an increasingly diverse community, they had started a contemporary worship service called "the Corner," which was apt considering the church's physical location. During an interim period without a senior pastor, the WRBC leadership elected to combine the traditional and contemporary services. The Corner's existence had contributed to the conflict at the church — some were opposed to even the idea of contemporary worship; others loved it.

With the hiring of Michael Tutterow as WRBC's fourth senior pastor, energy mounted for relaunching the Corner. Michael had gained notoriety through his tenure as the lead pastor of Winter Park Baptist Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he brought healing and solidarity to a church that had divided itself over worship styles. Michael had been able to help Winter Park Baptist embrace its identity as one church with two modes of worship expression. He seemed like the perfect person to restore WRBC to health and wholeness.

When I joined the pastoral staff at WRBC, I hosted a series of listening sessions with those worshipers who had attended the Corner and were still grieving its demise. Through these conversations,...