A friend of mine told me about a bike accident she had.

Sitting knee to knee on a crisp fall afternoon, she told me about how it wasn’t a terrible bike accident, but it was a little bloody, and bad enough to need a bandaid. So she went around town looking for one.

She went from church to church, looking for a band aid. Some churches said they didn’t have bandaids. Some were locked, not available for her to wash up and tend to her wound.

Sitting on the couch, looking out my window on a snowy Minnesota, streets filled with churches, we laughed at the absurdity of it. Church buildings, that we’ve been parts of, that we’ve worshiped in and cared for, dedicated solely to serving the lord don’t even have the infrastructure to support the crucified and embodied christ in a bloody knee.

So of course, we got to dreaming.

We thought about the historical and scriptural role of religious sanctuary. Exodus talks about god making a safe place for people who accidentally killed someone. And churches do have a quiet but consistent history of using their power in society and physical property to harbor people being persecuted by the state. We see this quiet legacy, from legal protection of criminals who hid in churches in the middle ages to the sanctuary movement of the 1980’s.*

I thought about the churches I know that are currently hosting needle exchanges, trying to help harbor refugees, and opening up their space to host community organizations for free and making commitments to not calling the police.

Churches have a history of leveraging their power from christian hegemony in Europe and the United States to use the physical spaces of their churches to make space for people who christians have disenfranchised through colonialism and the perpetuation of oppressive structures.

But it’s time to take it further.

There should be no empty buildings at nights when people are sleeping on the streets. No extra food in cabinets when people are going hungry. Saint Basil said it best. “The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked.” We, as people who attend worship in christian churches, have extra because of our systemic place of power at the expense of others.

It’s reparations that we owe.

So my friend and I decided, it’s a sin to lock a church door.

In many of our church communities, we center charity and treat it like an extra-curricular. We pool extra resources, often from wealthier donors. We act like the only way to make change is community service, something with outside time and outside resources.

But what if we flip the script, and center the god present in those all those oppressed by the state in all things, instead of after hours, outside of church time and space?

Maybe, what we have is already enough, and it’s a matter of creative redistribution.

We follow the example of the god of multiplying fishes and loaves after all.

I think we have a lot of imagining to do.

What if we used churches as spaces for people historically oppressed by the church to live rent free? What if every church hosted a 24 hour take what you need safer sex and drug use supply stations? What if we offered space for safe and monitored use?

And yes, this is really fucking scary. Imagining getting busted for a fire code violation. Imagining being a first responder to someone experiencing an overdose in our church bathrooms.

So we would have to get creative. Talk about boundaries. Talk about resources. Be real about our own capacities and how we can show up without overloading ourselves. In ways that are life-giving to ourselves and others. Our churches would have to lay ourselves bare and have the hard conversations.

But it would open up dialogues that would break our churches open and make room for god in our churches.

It is advent after all. Let’s make more room for the embodied jesus.



*Check out more about the historical and legal legacy of churches harboring those oppressed by the state here: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/08/can-criminals-hide-in-churches.html