Becky DeOliveira

29 Sep

COMMUNITY

In

By Becky De Oliveira — I have been involved in a number of Seventh-day Adventist congregations over the course of my life. Three stand out as particularly good—from my point of view. In trying to determine what I envision for the church of the future—the theme of this issue of Mountain Views—I’ve tried to consider what qualities those congregations had that made them good. I’m not naming names, but rather giving loose geographic locations and descriptions that might enable the careful observer to identify the congregation in question.

Kent, England

Nothing about this church initially recommended it. On my first visit, I considered it deeply weird. Located not far—but far enough—from London, in a ramshackle town, the building was junky. Many of the women wore hats. A few insisted on lace head coverings that looked like doilies when they prayed or stood up on the platform. The hymns were traditionally somber and accompanied by an anemic organ. But of the two churches and church plant my husband and I attended—he as an intern pastor partly responsible for their flourishing—this church was by far my favorite. Why? There was a great community of people who often spent time together. We’d gather at homes after church or during the week. One youngish couple often invited a homeless person to join us. We were a multicultural group made up of people native to Britain of all races, as well as those from various European nations and those originating in the West Indies or African. There was even the one American—me. One night a group of us were returning to one member’s home just as a burglar dashed off into the dark and we discovered the front panel to his door had been broken and things were missing from his house. We stood around while he phoned the police, comforting him, being there. When I hosted American Thanksgiving, the people from this church made up the bulk of the guest list.

Hertfordshire, England

This church had a reputation as a difficult place for a pastor, so naturally we ended up there just two months before our oldest son, now almost 22, was born. At first, predictably, I hated it. So many fights about flowers and carpet tiles and paint swatches and music style. But again—community. By the time we moved, we had two small children, and this church was a perfect environment. There were lots of young families, and, best of all, after church was over everyone gathered in a large multi-use hall for drinks and biscuits (cookies). All the kids ran around while the adults chatted. We took church trips to the beach, to a large nearby garden, to a forest. We were friends.

Michigan, USA

After sitting with friends one afternoon in Michigan and confessing that we had ceased to enjoy going to the huge local church in our area (too crowded to find a seat, few opportunities for interaction), we decided to start a new church service for all the people who were like us. Who knew how many there would be? It turned out to be hundreds, and our weekly service was soon packed—again, families with teenagers and kids—often families that had stopped attending anywhere else. We started serving an informal breakfast and the teenagers and young adults piled their plates high with whatever was on offer. At first, no one was even in charge of breakfast. People brought random offerings, as they might to a potluck, and the table was a delightful hodge-podge of homemade banana bread, boxes of chocolate covered Hostess donuts, string cheese, tiny orange juice bottles, granola bars—anything anyone wanted to contribute. We spilled outside onto the patio when the weather was good to talk after church was over. When it was cold, we made use of the large hallways, both upstairs and downstairs. When members were sick, the community banded around them, delivering meals, offering gifts, phone calls, taking up monetary collections.

Each of these congregations is an example of how church can be a family. That is what I would most like to see catch on to a greater extent in the future. I’m not sure it matters exactly how this is accomplished, and good congregations like these will likely look different in different areas. You will know them by the way they make you feel. Like you don’t ever want to leave. Like these are your people.

–Becky De Oliveira is a doctoral student at the University of Northern Colorado. Email her at [email protected]

23 Jun

SHOULD

In

By Becky De Oliveira … Recently, I visited a beautiful big city with a few of the all-too-common big city problems on display in big cities everywhere. Addiction. Poverty. Homelessness. Mental illness. Wealth disparity. Violence. Filth. On a street with all these problems on display simultaneously, I saw a young man, shirtless, passed out against a wall on a pile of garbage, the sun beating full on his chest and face. He was pale, like me. I’ve had skin cancer. I see the dermatologist often; she knows my kids’ names. “That guy is going to get fried,” I said aloud, from the passenger seat of the car. What I should do, I thought, is cover him up with something. What? I didn’t have anything. I could go somewhere and buy something (a thin blanket maybe?) and come back. But I didn’t. I tried to envision stopping the car on this particular street, getting out. There was no way to imagine it that didn’t seem extremely ill-advised. Even driving too slowly tempted fate. This was the kind of street you blast though, eyes fixed a hundred yards ahead, windows rolled tight, jaw clenched. In and out, thankful you have somewhere else you can go tonight.

I developed a series of arguments to support my intuition, most of them pretty compelling. Maybe the man would not want to be covered with a blanket. His friends (?)—a menacing group arranged in various alarming poses—might take issue with my covering him. Perhaps he would awaken of his own accord sooner than I imagined and stagger off to find shade. He was a grown man, not a toddler. He’d kept himself alive this long, without any assistance from me. Not a single friend or family member would agree that I should intervene in this situation, fearing for my safety. We can blame them. Or how about my relative powerlessness within the, um, system? You know, the social system. Or the system that governs the universe. I can’t fix anything. I’m not anyone’s savior. Duh. Sunburn is really probably the very least of this guy’s problems. His problems, judging from the setup on that street, are vast and unsolvable. Thinking about them makes my head hurt. A melanoma, I think, not without a twinge of guilt, would probably be a mercy. Argument with self quite easily settled. Drive on by, end up somewhere far more beautiful and soothing to the soul. Fly home the next day, never to see that man again. I went to a Big City and all I brought home was this anecdote—a should-have story—of the kind that Christians so often use to illustrate all the ways in which they (we) fail to live up to our calling.

In Bible study classes, on social media, during the course of friendly conversation, Christians tend to exchange thoughts and opinions about what we, as Christians, should be doing. It is never the thing we are doing. I can’t even give a numeric estimate of how many Saturday morning discussion groups have segued from whatever the topic happens to be to the topic that is really on everyone’s mind: What we should be doing. Instead of sitting here, we should be out on the city streets helping the poor and homeless. But we never are. We should be the most loving, amazing people anyone has ever met. For my money, I’d say some of us are—but those of us lamenting the state of Christians will never admit to that. We (they? us?) are not living out the true mission.

Now, I don’t necessarily agree that Christians have a certain duty to humanity that other people don’t have. My humanity compels me to compassion, not a specific belief system into which I was born and have been educated. When I look at someone on the street and wonder what I should do, I’m not wondering what I should do as a Christian. I mean as a person. A woman. An American. An individual with a certain amount of problem-solving ability, under the right circumstances. And yeah, sure, also as a Christian. Problems will not, usually, solve themselves. I don’t believe in magic. None of us do. We know that we are the hands and feet. There are things we could (should) be doing.

But how do we decide what they are, let alone begin doing them rather than talking about doing them?

I am well aware that many readers of this magazine do an enormous amount of good—practical, tangible deeds that require a lot from them, financially and emotionally. I do these kinds of things too, at least sometimes. I do not do every good deed that occurs to me on impulse, nor even everyone I think about carefully. Is this a problem? Sure. I try to be loving and non-judgmental, but I do not always succeed at that either.

One thing I think about occasionally is how we are all at very different places in our lives, with widely varying capacities—financially, emotionally, temporally. The discussions about what we “should” be doing rarely take into account individual capacity. They are one-fit magic bullet solutions. If we were all doing X, things would be better.

I believe it is important to consider your actions from the vantage point of the future: How will this action appear to me in ten years? To what extent does it contribute to helping me be the kind of person I would like to be? From that point of view, constantly talking about what you should do rather than doing it is not very efficient. But it is also important to communicate your feelings, even those of regret, and maybe these conversations help move us, if ever so slightly, in the right direction. Keep trying to close that gap between should have and did.

–Becky De Oliveira is a doctoral candidate in research methods at the University of Northern Colorado. Email her at: [email protected]

04 Jan

DOING BETTER

In

By Becky DeOliveira — On my first day of first grade, back in 1978, a girl came to our Seventh-day Adventist K–10 school wearing a pair of gold stud earrings. The teacher asked her to remove them— in accordance with the dress code. The six-year-old girl did not comply, for whatever reason. It is quite possible that her mother had warned her never to remove those studs. Who knows? At any rate, minutes later the new first-grade class was treated to the sight of our teacher, a woman who appeared very old to me with her 1950s-styled grey hair and brown homemade polyester pantsuit, chasing the little girl around the classroom with a broom, swatting her bottom every chance she got. The girl was fast; the chase took the pair outside at one point and I can’t remember now how it all ended. Presumably, the girl was caught and punished.

The next year we were a combined first- and second- grade classroom. There was a boy in first grade who struggled to read and was often sent into an adjoining room with either the teacher’s aide or another student, one who was caught up on his or her work. A wooden paddle went into the room along with them. If the boy made a mistake or failed to cooperate, he was paddled. I remember seeing him often with fat tears rolling down his cheeks.

My elementary school was in the suburbs of a large city on the West Coast of the United States. It was supported by three constituent churches. Two of them were predominantly white churches located in the suburbs. One was predominantly Black and located in the city center. That church had purchased a bus that carried a load of kids across the bridge to the Christian school every day. Would it surprise you much if I told you both the kids, I observed being physically hit in the first and second grades were kids who arrived every day on that very bus? Black kids?

What would you guess as the probability that yours truly would have ever been hit by a teacher—or by a student acting on the teacher’s behalf? Let’s put it at p <.001—pretty low. They would have called my parents.

I’m ashamed to say it, but at the age of six, I didn’t question the disproportionate corporal punishment doled out to the Black kids. I assumed they must be bad kids, must have done something to deserve it. Now I think about their parents, living across the bridge, walking their children to the bus stop every morning and putting them on a forty-five-minute or maybe even hour-long commute to a Christian school where they must have hoped—as all parents do—that their children would be nurtured, treated with kindness, cherished. Loved. It kills me, thinking about it.

I’ve gone on in life to experience many more situations where I am shielded from unpleasantness while others—often Black others—face it. Walking through customs at Heathrow airport, as I used to do on at least an annual basis, it was always interesting to observe the people who had been selected for special screening. At least 90% Black. And dashing through airports with a Black Canadian friend on a journey to London a few years ago reminded me yet again of my privilege. He was stopped at every security checkpoint. Every single one. He, a mild-mannered and unassuming gospel singer. We joked about it, but it wasn’t especially funny. Not really.

That Black church, the one that sent the school bus over the bridge? They stopped sending it just a few years later. There was a disagreement with the school principal regarding the discipline of some of the church’s kids. The white point of view was that the Black church was being unreason- able. Me? I’m not so sure about that. I don’t know their story. No one ever talked about it. That bus stopped crossing the bridge and maybe everyone just forgot about those kids. It would have been an uncomfortable thing to confront, there is no doubt about that. No one likes to think they are behaving unfairly or acting in a way that could properly be called racist. But sometimes people are. And rather than pretending this isn’t happening, to make ourselves feel better, maybe we should acknowledge the inequality and do something about it.

There is a car that blasts through my neighborhood painted in full “Blue Lives Matter” colors. That’s quite a commitment to a statement that seems more about refuting Black Lives Matter than it is about anything else. Yes, we know that blue lives matter. You know how we know? When one of them is extinguished, the punishment is swift, certain, and severe. I knew that my white life mattered back in elementary school. How? Because no one spanked me for a trivial reason. I know it now. Why? Because no one stops and frisks me at the airport. No one pulls me over in my car to ask what I’m doing. No one wonders why I’m jogging through my own neighborhood. As a society, we can do better. We can do better as a church too. We have to.

–Becky De Oliveira is a doctoral student in research methods at the University of Northern Colorado. Email her at: [email protected]