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Blacksburg Churches Collaborate for Worship Renewal
by Allison Graff
On Sunday, November 4, 2007, worshiping communities in Blacksburg, Virginia, including grant recipients in the Worship Renewal Grants program, will gather to worship on the campus of Virginia Tech. A group of leaders and students from Calvin College, Calvin Theological Seminary, and the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship will travel to Blacksburg to worship with those who gather. Here is the story of these worshiping communities in Blacksburg.
• "Celebrating, Healing, Serving" worship service in Blacksburg on Nov. 4, 2007
• Interview with worship leaders in Blacksburg
• More about this grant project
Communities rise and fall depending on their response to crisis.
When monumental tragedy struck the Blacksburg, Virginia community on April 16, 2007, the response of the community could have gone in different ways. The emotional battle raged in the days and months after the Virginia Tech shootings, and area churches were hardly exempt from dealing with what had taken place. In fact, they were at the epicenter of community grief as their own members and attendees mourned friends, parents, children and professors lost in the nation’s largest mass shooting ever.
Samantha Quesenberry of Luther Memorial Lutheran Church in Blacksburg received numerous phone calls after April 16 from people wanting to know, “So, how close are you to Virginia Tech?” The question was almost laughable considering that the small town of Blacksburg practically is Virginia Tech.
“It’s not like VT is there and we’re here. The university is in the middle of Blacksburg and Blacksburg is in the middle of the university. If you have the nine degrees of separation normally, there’s only one degree of separation in Blacksburg,” she said.
Blacksburg United Methodist Church is literally at the back door of Virginia Tech’s campus. Morris Fleischer, Assistant Pastor at Blacksburg UMC, recounts how on the night of April 17, 2007, parishioners at his church gathered for a special prayer service and then, once finished, exited the church building straight onto the Virginia Tech lawn where the nationally televised prayer vigil was being held.
'It’s a powerful witness to our own congregations that we’re committed to doing this together, but it’s also a powerful witness to the students as well.' - Samantha Quesenberry, Luther Memorial Lutheran Church |
Considering how intimately close Blacksburg UMC, Luther Memorial and other area churches are to the Virginia Tech community, they had no way to escape the question of how they would respond to the crisis. Four of these Blacksburg churches—all from different denominations—knew exactly how they would deal with grief in their community: together.
The churches, Luther Memorial Lutheran Church, Blacksburg Baptist Church, Blacksburg Presbyterian Church, and Blacksburg United Methodist Church, have now organized a special inter-denominational service to be held on the campus of Virginia Tech on November 4, 2007.
“It’s a powerful witness to our own congregations that we’re committed to doing this together, but it’s also a powerful witness to the students as well,” said Quesenberry about the community service.
Long before the events of April 16, 2007, these churches had begun talking about just how worship might become a more vital part of their community. With the help of a worship renewal grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, they began monthly meetings and held a weekend retreat in the fall of 2006 to discuss topics related to worship. Each church dreamed up a worship renewal project for their individual congregations, and then began to think about collaborative projects that would bring their congregations together. Little did they know that they were preparing for something that would require untold solidarity.
“We learned that we’re not competing, that the souls in Blacksburg will be well-tended no matter which of these churches they go to,” Quesenberry said.
'We could be a voice standing up in the community saying, ‘this ought not be so.’ And being a voice that’s willing to help people ask the question ‘Why?’ by directing them to the 13th Psalm that says, ‘How long, oh Lord…?’ The churches have been able to help the community grieve.' |
With the focus of worship renewal now on unity, representatives from the four churches began the relationship-building process, learning how to talk and relate to each other. The fruit of this process included some small but important steps toward working together in Blacksburg. Parish nurses at the different congregations began to work together to assess and meet the needs of the community, and the churches began to publicize groups and events in each others’ bulletins.
For Fleischer, building bonds between the congregations in his community was all about trust.
“It seems we live in a world where we’re just competing with each other. Even in the church, denominations—even churches within the same denomination—are competing with each other for members. It’s very challenging to be open and just say, ‘Maybe the Lutheran church is an expression of these gifts of grace, and maybe the Presbyterian church brings another kind of ministry to the floor and the Methodist brings this, the Episcopal church brings that.’ If the Baptist church is doing a divorce recovery group, why can’t we have people from our church find connection through other people there in our small community without threat or fear of somehow losing them to another church? And if we did lose them, why would that be such a big deal?” he said.
After meeting monthly for more than half a year, the four congregations involved in the worship renewal project came together for their first collaborative event: a Lenten prayer walk through the city of Blacksburg. The walk was designed in the spirit of the Stations of the Cross, with each station on the way representing an issue in the community. Those keeping vigil on the walk stopped at ten places, including the police station to pray for justice, at an individually chosen “beautiful spot” to pray for the environment, and at one of the university’s academic buildings to pray for those in pursuit of knowledge.
Though Luther Memorial and Blacksburg UMC had tried emergent-style worship services to be “relevant” to the college community, the prayer walk was a way for them to be relevant in a completely new way: by addressing and praying for the current needs of the community.
“We’re a united group speaking out on issues relevant to our actual communities. The church has been accused far too long of being irrelevant to communities, something that has been part of the decline of mainline churches. But this kind of thing reminds people that we still have a prophetic voice in the world,” said Fleischer about the prayer walk.
After the tragic shootings on April 16, when gunman Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus, it became clear to the church leaders involved in the worship renewal project that their united prayers for Blacksburg were preparing them for what would come. The walk brought the congregations together and helped them see their town with new eyes.
'When the tragedy happened, the little details of worship renewal certainly seemed trivial, but the overarching goals of worship renewal seemed tremendously important.' |
And so, difficult as it was, Rev. Fleischer and others at his church were ready to grieve with a mother in their church whose daughter was gunned down while she was in French class. The congregation at Luther Memorial struggled along with a student whose life was spared by her engineering professor, Liviu Librescu, who blocked the door of his classroom so she and other students could jump out of the second floor window.
“Solidarity is a word that keeps coming to mind when I think about the whole ordeal,” said Rev. Fleischer, reflecting on the response of the four congregations after April 16. “We could be a voice standing up in the community saying, ‘this ought not be so.’ And being a voice that’s willing to help people ask the question ‘Why?’ by directing them to the 13th Psalm that says, ‘How long, oh Lord…?’ The churches have been able to help the community grieve.”
Quesenberry continued Rev. Fleischer’s thought on the congregations and their response to the tragedy:
“And I think it’s going to be even more so in the fall service because we’ve continued from that point on to build these relationships and these bonds. We already had the bonds started and the tragedy just made those bonds stronger and the connections more real. When the tragedy happened, the little details of worship renewal certainly seemed trivial, but the overarching goals of worship renewal seemed tremendously important.”
After the tragedy, the church had a role to play in how the community would view itself, and further, how the world would view the Blacksburg community. Would the VT logo forever be associated with death and suffering? Would Blacksburg simply be the place where a great massacre occurred?
“You hear this resounding, ‘We don’t want to let this one day define us,’” said Quesenberry. “However, as the church, I’d really like this one day to define us and how we are as a ministering voice. You can’t say, ‘This isn’t going to define us,’ because it is going to. Rather we can say that this can define us in a positive way, as a strong, persevering community, as a community of faith.”
To Rev. Fleischer, there is a resonance between the great suffering experienced by the Blacksburg community after April 16 and the truth about suffering and hope contained in the Christian faith.
“We as Christians are defined by particular days—the Crucifixion, the Resurrection—there’s good precedent to say that we really are defined by certain things. As Christians, we hold to the truth that the stone is rolled away and the tomb is empty—we’re the Easter people,” he said.
Now, six months after the April 16 tragedy, the churches involved in the worship renewal project have planned a service designed to keep the Christian story in conversation with the community that continues to grieve.
Originally the service was meant to be an ecumenical service to bookend the worship renewal project in the spring or summer of 2007.
“But God has some mysteriously wonderful ways of pulling things together,” said Quesenberry about the often-frustrating details of service planning.
After the tragedy, Tony Campolo, a well-known speaker the planning group had been unable to book for the service, contacted the group and offered to clear a date in his busy schedule. The date happened to be the first Sunday in November—All Saints’ Sunday.
“This is a very significant day for many of our traditions to remember those that have passed away in the year since the previous All Saints’ Day. It’s kind of like the memorial day of the church,” said Rev. Fleischer.
The planning group was able to book the 10,500-seat Cassell Coliseum on Virginia Tech’s campus for the All Saints’ Sunday service, allowing the four churches to open the ecumenical event to all the churches and campus ministries in Blacksburg.
And so with an excellent speaker, a meaningful date and a special venue secured, what was once going to be a bookend to the churches’ grant project is now going to be a service of healing for the entire Blacksburg community. The service, “Celebrating…Healing…Serving,” is meant to be a testament to the power of Christian unity in the face of darkness.
“One of the great benefits of working with these other churches is that it says to the community, ‘The church is real, the church cares, the church is here and now and not just living in the past. God is here and maybe the church is a place where God can be found in the midst of tragedy,” said Rev. Fleischer.
What began as a grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship for Blacksburg area churches to explore worship renewal has become something much bigger than anyone could have ever imagined.
“This grant has helped us to build a foundation when we needed it. It’s been a great gift that we’ve been given to prepare us for a time of great suffering. It has given us a base to work through that and also to work from it” said Rev. Fleischer.
For Quesenberry, the process of renewal and healing started with relationship-building. Through that, and through lots of conversation and prayer, the work of renewal and healing can now begin.
Allison Graff is the web communications coordinator in the Calvin College office of communications and marketing and a former student assistant for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. She graduated from Calvin in 2007.