Reawakening Bangor
When you think of Maine, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? I bet you it’s lobster:) Even though that staple of fine dining from my childhood, Red Lobster, has recently declared bankruptcy due to an unfortunate miscalculation on offering all-you-can-eat shrimp, and we won’t be able to enjoy those ridiculously addictive cheese biscuits any more…there is hope for all you lobster lovers out there. At our recent Regional Reawakening in Bangor, Maine three weeks ago, our friends at Imago Dei Church threw a lobster feast fit for a king!
There are moments in this life when we experience eternity, when we get a taste of what it will be like when we see the Lord face to face, when all that we know by faith will become our reality. This feast was one of those moments. As we were brainstorming and praying with the excellent team that The Rev. Steve Hoskins and his wife, Sarah, had assembled they were very clear on their desire to “Love Your Place” – a theme Steve has been preaching and teaching on lately. They wanted to bloom where the Lord had planted them and be a blessing to their people and the surrounding Bangor community. The thought of an extravagant meal was one of the first things that came to the team’s mind. The Holy Spirit had blessed the Hoskins and their crew with the radical generosity of the Father in heaven. Forget shrimp! Thanks to one of their congregants, a lobsterman named Henry with a serious gift for hospitality, they were able to put on an all-you-can-eat buffet of lobster! We were getting a foretaste of the promises in Song of Solomon 2:4 and Revelation 19:9 of being brought to our Bridegroom’s banqueting table and eating the marriage supper of the Lamb. It was a true-life example of Babette’s Feast!
It was hard to imagine that anything would be able to follow up such a meal, but with our stomachs full and our briny smelling hands, Kate led us all downstairs to where our team had prepared a banquet of creativity for the church. All of this stemmed from the guiding Scripture passage, John 14:18, that the Lord had given us as we planned for this weekend, when Jesus promises his disciples, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” The interesting part of this moment with Jesus is that he makes this promise when he’s telling his disciples that he’s going to leave! So often he gives his promises in the face of the opposite. That’s always when we need to hear a promise…when things are most bleak. Jesus promises his disciples and us that his going would actually usher in an era of his presence in a new way. He would send his Holy Spirit to them and us. By giving his Holy Spirit, he would now be closer to us than ever before. He would dwell in us. Meditating on this passage along with feasting at the Lord’s table, Kate developed an art project to lean into these promises in light of the very real feeling of being left that Jesus acknowledges.
Everyone was invited to bring a plate with them that evening that they would break. The smashing of our plates was a catharsis, a release of all of the tension and emotion we had been carrying with us. For some this was exhilarating and fun to get some anger out, in fact they spent quite a bit of time whacking their plates with their hammers. For others it was painful as it triggered memories of trauma, but it was a release for all. Really making space for us to truly go to those deep places of discontinuity in our lives that Jesus clearly had in view. Then Kate instructed everyone to take the shattered pieces of their plate and create something new out of it as they glued it to a canvas board. Many painted their boards first; some painted their broken pieces to transform them completely.
The very cool development was that everyone began sharing and searching for pieces from each other’s smashed plates (and the bins of smashed pieces that Dan Miller and we had brought with us) to make something completely new out of the brokenness. It was such a beautiful picture of how the Lord gives us fellowship with one another in our weakness and hurt, none of us are alone in what we are dealing with right now, and in the confessing and vulnerability together we find new life in him. We are met with love and forgiveness…grace. The new creations were stunning. We laid them all down on the floor to dry and Kate invited each person to share, if they wanted to (and everyone did), about what they had made. One of the congregants later marveled, “Have you ever been a part of something like that before? Where both young and old were sharing so deeply and freely with each other.” It’s true, the age span of the group went from little ones in single-digits to those in their 70s. The church had a lot of new members as well, which meant many of them did not know each other very well prior to this evening, but the Lord had used the beautiful meal and Kate’s thoughtful art project to take them deep quickly.
The next day, we took the desire to bloom where we are planted quite literally. Bangor has a program every spring to beautify the city where groups can adopt a plot around the city to clean, plant, and maintain throughout the year. After many other excellent ideas for outreach had to be postponed due to conflicts on our planned weekend, Kathryn Miller remembered they had adopted a plot back in the days of COVID to show solidarity with the city and wondered if that might be something the church could participate in again. The idea stoked the creative juices of the team and pretty soon the vision had grown two-fold to where they not only wanted to beautify and bless the city, but they also wanted to beautify and bless the Baptist Church they rented as their worship space. This lined up perfectly with the gifts and passions of many of their members. Folks who hadn’t led anything before in the church were now stepping up and planning out how they would clean up and improve the grounds of the church as well as which plants and flowers to plant at the city site. The final touch was a simple outreach idea that Kate and I had used many times before in Pittsburgh and Charleston and that was to bring a gift to the local businesses and offer prayer. The group decided we would bring small potted plants and water bottles with a simple message of blessing attached signed by a congregant to the businesses within walking distance on the church of which there were a lot.
Steve and Sarah were excited by the turnout the whole weekend. A group of over 50 showed up that Saturday morning. We began with some simple ways to share with neighbors we encountered out on the street. Bishop Drew gave a short encouragement about following the Lord’s leading as we go out. Then I gave little homily on the story from 2 Samuel 9 of David welcoming Jonathan’s orphaned son, Mephibosheth, into his household and to his table tying in the previous night’s feast and art project into our overall theme of the Lord not leaving us as orphans. Instead, he welcomes us into the fellowship he has with his Father in heaven through the power of his Holy Spirit.
Leading worship before we go out on Saturday
The very organized team leaders had invited people to sign up for one of the three different teams. 1. Cleaning and planting the adopted city plot. 2. Offering gifts and prayer to the local businesses and other groups beautifying the city. 3. Beautifying the church and it’s grounds. No team was lacking. We prayed, and off we went. Bishop Drew, Rhyan, and I partnered with the gift giving crew, while Kate and Skylar tackled the city plot. We could see the Lord’s wisdom in leading the group to this idea for outreach because you could not have picked a better day to be out in the city. There were people everywhere working to love their place, and we and the Imago Dei team got to partner with them. Group after group was cleaning up garbage, tilling the soil, and planting new flowers and plants.
We quickly ran out of potted plant gifts for the businesses, but the ones who received them were grateful. Rhyan and I got to pray for a tattoo artist in his shop, who turned out to be the lone Christian amongst his colleagues (none of whom had arrived for work yet). We got to encourage him in his steady witness in his shop. We prayed for two young workers in the toy shop who clearly were not believers, but were happy to receive a blessing. We thanked other groups working in their plots on the street. We did a lot of listening to the owners of a city staple business who were retiring and closing up their antique store after 45 years there and just needed someone to tell some of their stories. We gave out about a hundred bottles of water to shop workers and people on the street.
After covering the city center and giving all our gifts away we joined up with the team working on the city plot. The church had adopted two long rectangular plots bordering a memorial fountain next to the public library just down the hill from the church building. The memorial was to the loggers and the lumber industry who really put Bangor on the map in the early 19th century. The fountain clearly had not run in years and now had become essentially an open cesspool. Before I knew it, Bishop Drew and a congregant named, Mark, were raking and cleaning out the black water in the fountain. Then I found myself helping them with the associate priest, Laura, who actually got down on her belly to drag a rather large rock out of the pool. Once she had it out, we turned it over and it had the words “You are enough” painted on it. We thought this was a lovely message with a double meaning. Jesus is more than enough for us all, and by his grace we are enough. So, the rock became a part of the garden. While pulling everything from a creepy toy pig to a hair straightening iron out of the putrid gunk in the cesspool fountain, we were thankful to learn that Mark happened to be an infectious disease specialist at the hospital, so he knew how to treat us if we contracted something horrible. Thankfully, everyone seems fine although I do glow at night now.
It was no mystery how the fountain had gotten to that disgusting place. About 50 feet away from us in the grass was a man lying passed out in a drug induced sleep, his possessions strewn about him. Around the church people were picking up hypodermic needles as they cleaned up, all signs to the growing opioid and drug epidemic in our New England cities. As Bishop Drew assembled a bag of food from our feast the previous night and lunch that day and left it next to this man for when he awoke, I said, “Can you imagine what he’s carrying that this (being dangerously vulnerable, passed out in the middle of the day in public) is better than feeling that pain?” The fountain was a symbol of the pain and desperate need for God’s grace…a memory of pride and dignity for this city that had become a public toilet for those suffering in addiction and homelessness. And the Lord had his people there to clean it out. We had no illusions. It would probably be back in that rough state within a week, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the display of the Lord’s love and care for Bangor through this church. Part of adopting the plot means that you’re committing to care for the space for the year, and Imago Dei Church would continue to display God’s unending grace for his people. They’d keep coming back, they’d keep loving their place no matter how bad it got again.
The next morning, as we walked up the path with the newly painted railing, past the lovely new garden beds, and through the newly painted doors we joined to worship and celebrate all the Lord had done. Bishop Drew and the Rev. Steve led the liturgy, and I got to play with the worship team. 5 people (young and not so young) were confirmed in front of the finished artwork from Friday night now standing at the table showcasing all the new life the Lord was bringing out of the pain and brokenness. It truly was the beginning of a Reawakening for this church and for the wider community. We continue to hear the excitement it generated amongst the congregation, and we can’t wait to see how the Lord uses all those interactions and touch points with the neighborhood. We won’t know some of the fruit until we’re finally sitting at that table at the wedding feast of the Lamb, but I bet we’ll be eating with people from Bangor who trace their life in the Lord back to that weekend. And we’ll all praise God for pulling us out of the muck and the mire of our sin and making us his very own. And I bet you there will be plenty of lobster.
