The Pastor in the Basement

1,095 Words
Target publication: Some religious magazine


           Drive South down Oakland Drive past rows and rows of suburban homes with immaculate lawns, and then take a right down Winchell Avenue. Keep going for about a quarter of a mile until you see a large brown-brick church with a wooden cross in the yard facing all who drive by. Open the door and accept a bulletin and a hug from the grandfatherly greeter. Look to the right at the empty, imposing sanctuary, with another cross standing behind a raised pulpit. Walk towards the sanctuary, only to be directed to the stairs on the left by the smiling greeter. Step into the basement lit by fluorescent lights, take a drink from the white water fountain and see the thirty or so gray-haired men and women milling around and finding seats as a younger man with an immaculately-trimmed beard fingerpicks his way through one of today’s hymns one last time before the service. Take a seat in one of the battered, mint-colored chairs arranged two-deep in a half-circle, and look at the man standing behind the communion table.

            He’s about fifty, bald, with glasses, clad in a dark-blue shirt with a blue-striped tie and grey pants, and he would look like a well-dressed accountant were it not for the fact that he is standing behind an altar wearing a rainbow-colored stole emblazoned prominently with various gay-pride symbols.

            That man is Ken Arthur, pastor of Phoenix Community Church, a small United Church of Christ congregation that rents out the basement of the larger Disciples of Christ church upstairs. He is gay, and so are about eighty percent of his parishioners. Most members of his flock are in their fifties or sixties, and they wear their identities proudly: their church’s symbol is a rainbow-colored phoenix rising up from the flames against the backdrop of the LGBTQ symbol. The church switches between the traditional and the nontraditional at breakneck speed. On any given Sunday, an Indigo Girls song might follow a traditional hymn or a reading of one of Whitman’s poems might follow the recitation of The Disciples’ Prayer. The one constant is Pastor Ken, the mastermind, the glue that holds the whole post-postmodern religious collage together.

            Ken never planned on becoming a pastor, even though he grew up attending church in his hometown of Anderson, Indiana. The church was quite rigid and conservative, though Ken remembers thinking it was liberal “because they let us go to the movies and play cards.” He distills the general mindset of the church thusly: “God is nice if you believe, and if you don’t, you go to hell.” This image of God as an angry father troubled Ken, and, unable to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the existence of hell, he dropped out of church and left his faith behind when he came to Kalamazoo College in 1984.

            After getting his bachelor’s degree in math from Kalamazoo and a master’s in Computer Science, Ken began working as a freelance computer programmer.  During his twenties, Ken says he was an agnostic, though he frequently picked up spiritual texts such as The Dao of Pooh, a book that is still jammed in his office bookshelf with scores of other texts about religion and philosophy.

            But that all changed in 1996 when Ken turned thirty. As Ken puts it, “I was thirty when I started dealing with being gay.” Ironically, Ken wound up coming back to church as part of the coming-out process. He heard that Phoenix Community was a church with a gay pastor, and he visited hoping to “meet more gay people in a safe environment.” Attending Phoenix, along doing affirmation exercises that made him “feel like Stuart Smalley,” helped Ken come to terms with his identity as a gay man. Ken kept coming on Sundays, and within two years became a full-fledged member of the church.            

            But despite his regular Church attendance, Ken remained a skeptic for several more years. Eventually, though, he wavered from his agnosticism and fell back into faith. Ken says that rediscovering faith was a slow, gradual process. His one “A-ha!” moment came when the pastor at Phoenix led the congregation in a decidedly non-Christian spiritual practice: shamanic journeying. Essentially, shamanic journeying is a distillation of shamanic traditions from man varied cultures. By listening to a repetitive tribal drumbeat, would-be journeyers are able to enter a trance-like altered state that allows them to tap into the collective unconscious. Ken relates shamanic journeying to Jungian psychology, saying that it is a way of “dreaming symbolic meanings from a divine power.” The experience opened him up to the more intuitive, visceral aspects of faith. Eventually, Ken began to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

            Shortly after rediscovering his spirituality, Ken decided to pull up stakes and attend the Chicago Theological Seminary. While studying in the windy city, Ken decided that he “definitely didn’t want to be a minister” and opted to get a M.A. in Religious studies rather than the ministerial Master’s of Divinity.

            Shortly thereafter, Ken would, in fact, become a minister. When he returned, he found Phoenix in turmoil. Money, always a problem for small churches like Phoenix, had caused a great deal of discord among the congregation, and “enough people hurt enough other people” that one-third of the church left along with the pastor. Because of his background in the seminary, Ken was asked to fill in as an interim minister. However, as the interim period dragged on, he seemed more and more like the best candidate, and became Phoenix Community’s official pastor in 2010.

             As pastor, Ken promotes a brand of theology that rejects easy answers and “simple-minded, warm-and-fuzzy peace.” He welcomes questions and uncertainties. When asked about the specifics of the afterlife, he shrugs and says, “Who knows?” “When I talk about the Kingdom, I’m talking about realizing it here: working for peace and hope and justice here on Earth.”

            And Ken doesn’t do talk about the Kingdom in the prototypical preacher’s voice. His is a wispy tenor, not a booming baritone, and he speaks without amplification. His is a voice that is easily drowned out by anyone with a microphone, or even just a determined, loud man holding a sign on a street corner. He is not loud enough to compete with the Pat Robertson of the world. Yet when he preaches the Gospel, he still grabs you. The passion in his voice is palpable, like a cup running over quietly, as he preaches, love, justice, and reconciliation in the basement of a church.