I really, truly heard it for the first time: “I’m not missing something,” she said. “I don’t want you to see me as lacking. I’m perfectly fine without religion.”
So begins The Rev. Laura Everett’s blogpost on the most recent Annual Synod Assembly of the New England Synod of the ELCA. It invited ‘outsiders’ to speak to the gathered body, giving people inside the church the opportunity to actually listen to voices from outside itself.
Everett makes careful observations from the responses of the panels in her post, along with connecting it to Bishop James Hazelwood’s report the next day. (Hazelwood, on his blog “Bishop on a Bike”, refers people back to Everett as she “beat him to the punch” in composing a response to the panel experience.)