‘It’s messy, right?’

The Rev. Shawna Bowman, pastor of Friendship Presbyterian Church in Chicago, appears on the New Way podcast

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

The Rev. Shawna Bowman is pastor of Friendship Presbyterian Church on Chicago’s Northwest side. (Contributed photo)

LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Shawna Bowman, an artist, poet, community organizer and the pastor of Friendship Presbyterian Church on Chicago’s Northwest side, is the most recent guest on New Way, the podcast of the 1001 New Worshiping Communities movement. The Rev. Sara Hayden hosts the podcast, which is produced by the Rev. Marthame Sanders.

In the first part of the podcast, “It’s Messy, Right? A Conversation with Shawna Bowman,” which can be heard here, Hayden and Bowman discuss Friendship’s journey toward affordable housing partnership, the benefits of community longevity and the delicate balance of religious authenticity and communal presence.

“Many of us have a space that’s not our actual home, or maybe even the place we log the most hours. It’s a third place; somewhere we turn to with our extra time, even when we burn the candle at both ends — a place that calls to us for our attention, time, and love,” Hayden says. “These third places give back to us in some ways that surprise and delight us: the friendships we make there; the side by side of solving shared problems; and experiencing mutual delight. And if you asked us years later, ‘Do you remember those moments, those years we spent creating something beautiful?’ We had so much to give. Those moments in our shared spaces that we built together, fought for, invested in: they changed our lives and shaped our futures.”

“These most arresting words from Dr. Howard Thurman in his seminal ‘Meditations of the Heart’ capture the tension we feel so often as spiritual people: a yearning for the future, a rescue from our present predicaments, that — in many ways — we have intentionally or unknowingly caused. We need God’s help. We yearn to sort out our tomorrows, to have a deeper, more discerning relationship.”

“So, we have a small worshiping community,” Bowman tells Hayden. “On Sunday mornings, we worship hybrid, sort of fully interactive. We have members, elders, leaders, deacons, local and afar. And our worshiping community is 20 to 40 people on any given Sunday — sometimes half-and-half, online, in person.  And then there’s overlap with our worshiping community and our wider Friendship Community Place (is what we call our not-for-profit), and we draw on a really wide number of community members and our neighbors in the building to help us run our programming through the week. We have a really beautiful kitchen program, and we serve 120, 150 meals a week out of our kitchen, and share in those stories. We have a dozen kiddos in the building who, we joke, are our youth group that come whenever our door is open. It sort of depends on, as you turn the prism that is Friendship, what side you’re looking at, but that’s who we are.”

The second part of the podcast is titled “Here Are the Roots, Here Are the Branches: More with Shawna Bowman.” It can be heard here.

The Rev. Sara Hayden

“Sometimes it takes years, or even a lifetime, to taste the fruit from the seeds we sow in fertile soil,” Hayden says. “The ground must be prepared; the tender sprouts watered and nourished, sheltered, but not coddled. As the roots grow deep — unseen to the human eye but prepared by countless creatures hidden in the recesses of humus — change is happening.”

“I met a friend for lunch today who lives not far from me. He’s thinking of moving, of downsizing, and I said, ‘Come move to my block. I would love to curate a block where we would all take our fences out and we would have a community garden and a dog run,’” Bowman says. “And he said, ‘But who will buy all that property?’ And I was like, ‘All of us.’ To me, it’s not about creating a gated community, but actually opening the gates of our community and practicing in a really hyper-local way what it means to live together and be together. And in some ways, whether they wanted to or not, that’s sort of what’s happened to folks who’ve come to live in this building of 75 units, right? That you can get up and go to work every day and come home, and also it happens to be a building where there is this opportunity to build community, and there are people doing intergenerational life together there: they’re watching each other’s kiddos, they’re telling them to knock it off when they’re misbehaving and their parents aren’t around, they’re lending each other resources, they’re bringing things to our leverage to share with each other. Like, there are these glimpses, these moments of flourishing. And to me, that’s the blessing, that’s the possibility.”

The New Way podcast can also be heard on Apple and Spotify.