Rev. Chris, A Progressive Presence
ANNIE KELVIE
I must admit, it makes me a little nervous to be the first one to write a blog post for the new series, Faces of our Faith. I like modeling my writing off of what’s come before me. In that sense, I also like modeling my faith after what’s come before me, and I’ve been fortunate to have some pretty good ones come before me, like the Face of my Faith I’m writing about today: Rev. Chris Johnson.
To backtrack a little, when Pastor Josh emailed me to ask me to write the blog post, he asked me if I would be willing to “write about someone in your life pre-deconstruction or during the deconstruction of your faith that made an impression on you in some way, for instance, something they taught or modeled to you that you still hold onto in your faith formation today”. But the thing is, unlike most people at Imago, I never really had a faith deconstruction. I come from a completely secular, skeptical family, and when I was a toddler playing in the grass, my mom once was quoted saying, “I don’t think Annie knows who God even is”. My family (like most families) has given me some baggage to deal with, but that baggage has not been theological in nature.
God seemed to have other plans, though, about me figuring out who She was when I met one of my best friends in elementary school, Anna. Anna had an incredibly warm and kind family and we had plenty of weekend sleepovers that involved me going along to church with them on Sunday mornings at their Episcopal church. It all seemed so Mysterious and Important; I was hooked. We baby-sat in the nursery, played ridiculous games in youth group, delivered Thanksgiving meals for the food bank, and I became decidedly into this Jesus guy. There weren’t any weird purity culture virginity pledges or high-pressure altar calls that used hell as motivation; my intro to Christianity was decidedly gentler than many other stories I’ve heard. It was during this time in our friendship that her dad Chris ended up going into seminary to become an Episcopal minister himself.
While Anna and I grew apart as our childhood interests eventually diverged in high school and in college, Chris and I had regular Starbucks meetups to discuss the books we were reading, what he was preaching about, the woes of my young dating life. He introduced me to books about the historical Jesus and the relationship between modern physics and the Bible. He always intertwined his faith with social justice, turning his small northwest Denver church into a center for undocumented immigrants who lived in the neighborhood, finding ways to offer food and community and free legal assistance when he could track down professionals willing to help. He had no problem serving alongside women and enthusiastically married gay and lesbian couples, celebrating when the Episcopal denomination as a whole caught up with this in 2009. This version of faith that I inherited from Chris wasn’t one that needed a lot of deconstructing as I grew because it was always already big enough to grow along with me. I think that what he modeled for me that I most want to extend to people in my life was his treatment of me as a whole person from a young age. I always felt like he saw the Imago Dei in me, as someone with interests and quirks beyond fulfilling a particular role like “Good Christian Woman”. My hope and prayer is to similarly treat whoever’s in front of me as a whole, complex God-created being rather than simply a fulfillment of a role.
As I finish this post, I have been trying to think of one particular standout moment or anecdote to sum up Chris, but instead I’m just remembering his constant, steady presence when I very much needed one during the various turmoil of my late teens and early twenties. He has been that constant, steady presence in all the faith communities he’s served in Colorado and now Michigan. He may not have a podcast, hashtag, or much of a social media presence at all, but he’s been gently doing his progressive Christian thing since the 90s, and he is definitely a Face of the Faith worth meeting.
Annie is an Assistant Professor of English at Eureka College, where she teaches mostly writing classes (just like Dr. Jill Biden!), her favorite being Nature Writing. She can also be found spoiling her cat, trying to keep rodents out of her garden plot, hiking and (slowly) jogging on local trails, and not returning her library books in a timely fashion.