Craving the kinship of Disciples

The issue of corporal versus individual faith is a common one, especially in a cultural milieu that glorifies “spirituality” and rejects “church.” Many young adults claim a certain sense of individual spirituality, divorced from the structures and constraints of religious institutions.

However, there are those of us who cling to the idea of a church family, arguing that faith without context or community is incomplete. So what does one do when faced with a sort of forced solitude of faith?

This fall I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin my studies at Harvard Divinity School. While I am exceedingly excited about the opportunities here and the wider ecumenical and interfaith community, I find myself suddenly nostalgic for my Disciples family, just as I am for my biological family.

Sadly, we are not a very strong presence in this neck of the woods. There are a handful of us at HDS (an increase from past years), and a few Disciples churches a couple hundred miles away in New York state, and that’s about it. We are represented here by our sister denomination, the wonderful United Church of Christ, and that is a great thing, but it is not quite the same. There really is something to be said for the Disciples. We are a unique breed—diverse and yet oh-so-connected. There is a kinship in Disciple-dom that is difficult to replicate, and that sense of family is deeply missed, and markedly gone in this environment.

But I cannot claim that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I sent in my acceptance to Harvard Divinity School. I wanted to stretch myself beyond my boundaries and to engage in true theological dialogue with seminarians of many faith traditions. And so I will. Already, I am finding a surprisingly huge common ground theologically and philosophically with people from very different backgrounds than my own, and that is certainly invigorating and hope-inspiring. But I do miss my Disciples, and probably will for the next three years.

And so we shall see. I will of course become active in a parish here, and will develop a church family, in addition to my scholastic family of friends and colleagues , but I wonder if my heart will be satisfied by that, or if I will always dream of the next General Assembly.