‘Church, we have an oppression obsession’

NEXT Church gathering’s closing worship overlays the early church with the 12-step approach

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

the Rev. Shavon Starling-Louis

LOUISVILLE — Closing worship for the NEXT Church national gathering on Sunday brought together two ways of being community that you wouldn’t necessarily associate — Luke’s description in Acts 2 of how the early church functioned and the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which have been adapted to other addictions as well.

The Rev. Shavon Starling-Louis, pastor of Meadowlake Presbyterian Church in Huntersville, North Carolina, Sunday’s preacher, said ministry stops in several states in both urban and rural settings have convinced her of this: “Church, we have an oppression obsession,” she said. “We have a problem and we need help. I invite you across a threshold I am familiar with,” where “I have found shalom and healing and wellness, where I’ve seen miracles breaking forth in sacred spaces right around the corner.”

“There is a gift for the church this day in that space” of the 12-step process, she said during her sermon, interspersing groups of three steps with portions of Luke’s account. “We will find recovery is not about perfection, but about faithfulness.”

She then invited worshipers into a “mini” 12-step meeting.

The first person to share combined Acts 2:1-3 with the first three steps: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, we came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity and we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over the care of God as we understood God.

White supremacy and other forms of oppression “are not something we can undo for ourselves,” Starling-Louis said. “We inherited it, but like a home we inherited, we can make it better. We can say what needs to be said and openly surrender to God, who can do more than can ever imagine. We can stop this insanity of broken and sinful ways that look for a bad and good person in every situation.”

Acts 2:14-19, which has Peter quoting the prophet Joel about God pouring God’s Spirit upon all flesh, was paired with the next three steps: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves; we admitted to God, ourselves and another person the exact nature of our wrongs; and we were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

The church’s origin story, Starling-Louis noted, is “a story of unity in the midst of diversity. People from all over the world came because they understood what God was up to, and they didn’t even understand why.”

The church needs to perform that “searching and fearless moral inventory” because “there is liberation work at hand,” she said. “We can be free of those stifling and dysfunctional words, ‘We don’t do that here.’”

The third person read Acts 2:22-23 and 36-38, which includes “Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart … and asked, what should we do?” Accompanying that reading were steps 7-9: We humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings, we made a list of all the people we’d harmed and became willing to make amends to them all, and we made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Peter’s conversation noted here is an “intervention invitation,” Starling-Louis said, “a way to look at what is going on in this communal learning opportunity.”

“It’s easier to gossip about others who are worse than us. None of that is our business,” she said. “It is our call to learn by looking in the mirror and into the eyes of those we have injured … This is something we can learn as a church.” We’re called, Starling-Louis said, to the work the prophet Isaiah set before us: to build and rebuild, to be repairers of the breach and restorers of the streets we live in.

“That’s what Peter is pointing to, what the Holy Spirit expects us to do,” she said. “What if we worked the steps together as a way of repentance?”

Starling-Louis herself handled the fourth and final reading, from Acts 2:42-47. Then she read the last of the 12 steps: We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it, we sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, and having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others with addictions and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

“This is exactly the posture we need,” she said. “2020 and 2021 have taught us many things: what we hold in common and what’s at stake when we don’t pay attention. How will we find a way to be breaking, blessing and building this place for the common good,” a reference to the gathering theme, “and place it in the center of our work, in the center of our affairs — no matter what work we’re called to do.”

After leading worshipers through the best-known portion of the Serenity Prayer, Starling-Louis closed with this oft-recited 12-step saying: “It works only if you work it — and we’re worth it, so let’s work it.”