Dear Beloved Community,
Last month, my wonderful leadership coach used the phrase “widening the aperture” to guide my response to a situation we were discussing. Now we’re not all pro photographers like Roper or Ryan or Carlos, but perhaps you know its context: widening the aperture means opening the camera lens, such that light intake increases, the depth of field shallows, and the subject draws sharply into view as the background blurs artfully behind. You see how spacious and useful the phrase is, don’t you?
But not all things need widening, of course. I must narrow every week when writing a sermon, planning meals for my family, making a to-do list, figuring out how to prioritize my spending. Narrowing helps us choose a spouse, a home, a job, a hobby. Constraints are beautiful and necessary for this life.
Yet again and again these days, I am finding the work of aperture-widening to be the work of the Holy Spirit. Here’s a smattering of where I’ve seen this at work just this week.
Last week, I gathered with some of you at Temple Emanuel to celebrate the life of Seth Moskowitz and remember him with love. Seth entered our fold about seven or eight years ago, attending small groups and Bible studies the church hosted. His wife, Mary Ann, is one of our members, but Seth prided himself for his religious curiosity. He was a devout Jew, eager in his practice and faithful in his worship. Yet, he knew his love of God would only grow if his aperture widened. For years, he was a regular in Pastor David’s Tuesday morning devotional classics group, until his short and devastating bout with cancer took his life last week. I know my friendship with Seth widened me, and I trust all who knew and loved him would say the same. I felt every inch of that as the sound of the Psalms read in Hebrew washed over me in his shiva service last week.
Saturday morning, we filled our front lawn with other church folk whose churches were walking in the Winston-Salem Pride parade. The warm chicken biscuits and cold iced coffees made space for fellowship, solidarity, and connection: Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Episcopalians alike! There’s not yet been a Pride parade and festival for me when God’s expansive creation and love isn’t in full view, and this year was no exception. Big love, bold, wide, inclusive, sweeping love that leaves no one behind was our witness. The aperture widened with every step.
Monday night, our Leadership Council spent focused conversation on our church’s financial health, so well-grounded that the conversation intentionally grew into visioning beyond next year’s budget to the next 3-5 years of our ministry and mission. (Widening!) Sunday afternoon, our Deacons brainstormed ways to grow the footprint of our witness in Winston-Salem and what resources would allow us to do so. (Widening!) That evening, I was one of over 1000 local people of faith gathered for the founding assembly of Forsyth Strong (formerly known as IAF, and a good while back, CHANGE), ensuring that the voices from the ground are heard by those representing us above. The room was packed: people of many colors and ethnicities and languages and ages and abilities and backgrounds, working together for the common good. (Widening!)
I’m spending part of the week with hundreds of other Baptists at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s General Assembly, where together, we’re pursuing the Baptist witness of boldness in a world severely lacking of moral imagination. To the Southern Baptists so fixated on narrowing the pulpit and its witness that they’ll maddeningly lose members, credibility, faithfulness, and gifted leadership for its sake, being the “bold type” of Baptists widens the aperture (and makes me proud!).
And as one in a series of articles through Baptist News Global shared this summer on the occasion of our country’s 250th birthday, I wrote about how Baptist churches can become schools of civic engagement and democracy. It’s baked all the way into our DNA, where every member is a minister to each other. Every member chooses our ministries, and builds our budgets, and calls our pastors, and forms our values, and shapes the identity. How narrow the aperture would be if just a handful did all the deciding! Each person widens us into a more faithful, kind, just, generous, brave, hopeful, loving whole.
Indeed in a spiritual sense, widening the aperture increases the light, shallows the extra, and allows the subject of our love – of God, of neighbor, of self, of all creation – to come clearly into view.
May it be so for you this week!
Together in God’s work of Love,
Pastor Emily
