Interview with Blacksburg Grant Recipients

Two Worship Renewal Grants given to church leaders in Blacksburg, Virginia introduced us to this beautiful city. The horrifying events of April 16 touched these congregations and stretched them in ways they could not have imagined. At our Grants Colloquium, interviewer Allison Graff sat down with Samantha Quesenberry of Luther Memorial Lutheran Church in Blacksburg, and Rev. Morris Fleischer of Blacksburg United Methodist Church, to talk about their experiences leading worshipers through the months of grief and lament after the tragedy in their community.

Tell me a little bit about Blacksburg and the Virginia Tech campus.

Quesenberry: People would contact us after the April 17 tragedy and ask us, “How far are you from Virginia Tech?” Well 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.

Fleischer: All the churches involved in this grant are very close to the university.

Quesenberry: At the middle school where my husband teaches, four of the students lost their parents in the tragedy. My son’s teammate and good friend was one of the ones who lost their father. It’s a thing that’s affected our whole community and will continue to affect it for a long time.

Fleischer: In our church we’re connected with one family whose daughter was gunned down while she was in French class. Her mother is very involved in our afternoon tutoring program. To have her being affected and losing her daughter like that was devastating. It really changed the timbre of the worship experience in especially April and May. How do you help people through grief, how they define evil, how they look at a good God allowing evil to happen, questions of theodicy. All the churches have had to be very intentional about helping people with this.

Quesenberry: And helping people with survivor’s guilt. One student who worships with us was in the classroom where the professor was killed as he was blocking the door—the Holocaust survivor. She survived because what he did allowed her to jump out of the window. That Sunday, she and her parents were worshiping with us, so we had to figure out how to help her with survivor’s guilt.

Before this tragedy happened, how did your grant project build a spirit of unity among your churches, and how did that prepare you to deal with what happened?

Quesenberry: We had this cooperation with the six area churches. We all made this Worship Renewal Together team and started to meet on a monthly basis. Then when we had a church pull out of the project which was a stressful event in itself, but that really opened up the way for us to start to talk to each other and be honest with each other. 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. We spent a whole lot of our beginning time learning how to talk to each other, relate to each other, and just build relationships. So we feel like we’ve just started because we’ve done this year’s work of relationship-building and now we have our projects to work on!

Fleischer: If there’s one thing that’s come out of this it's 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 sometime 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 church 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 to another church, why would that be such a big deal?

The clergy in our area—aside from the senior pastors—we didn’t really know each other. The senior pastors would get together sometimes and sort of bump ideas around, but this grant project, it’s sort of trickle-down economics. Trust is really evolving.

Quesenberry: We now have some programs with the parish nurses working together. And we’re starting to think “our couples group is doing this, let’s advertise in other congregations' bulletins. It’s really become a trusting environment.

That’s a great witness to your community, especially to students who are often skeptical of organized religion because of how divisive it can be.

Fleischer: One of the reasons we’re doing a collective service in November with Tony Campolo, hopefully on VT’s campus with all six congregations as a part of it, is to stand in solidarity under the banner of Christ and say, “We can do this together.”

Quesenberry: It’s a powerful witness to our own congregations as well that we’re willing to do this together. But also to the students in the greater community. God has some mysteriously wonderful ways of pulling things together. We had not been able to get a speaker and had designed the November worship service before the tragedy took place. It was going to be this culminating event for our grant project. First we planned it for the spring, then the summer, then it was going to be the fall. After the tragedy, Tony Campolo made room in his schedule to be the speaker, and he’s booked for three years ahead of time! It turned out that it’s the first Sunday in November, which happens to be All Saints’ Sunday.

Fleischer: 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, the first Sunday of November.

I’m sure that will be especially powerful this year.

Quesenberry: It’s going to be a healing sort of worship service, even though that’s not what we originally planned on! It’s going to be a unifying and healing event.

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