I just finished Yascha Mounk’s new book, The Identity Trap, A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. It’s the best book on current culture I’ve read since The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

Mounk writes about the unfortunate contributions the left is making to our current cultural divide and what might be done about it. He includes a short section on the debate over transgender issues. For the most part, I have no problem with what he writes.

As a transgender speaker, I have not had much pushback from the anti-trans community, With my TEDTalk views approaching 10 million, I find that intriguing. To be sure, I receive  hate mail, mostly from the evangelical community, but not as much as others. I also have had conferences and corporations pass on me as a speaker because of my gender identity, but again, not as often as you might think.

The difference might be in the way in which I approach my gender identity. In my first TEDTalk I said, “People ask me if I feel 100 percent like a woman. I feel 100 percent like a transgender woman. There are things a cisgender woman knows that I will never know.” Those three sentences set a tone throughout the talk that says I’m not trying to claim to be something I am not.

I come from the borderlands between genders, a certain kind of liminal space. I have no doubt I am supposed to be living as Paula. The world receives me as a woman and that feels appropriate. I never felt as comfortable as Paul as I do as Paula. But I am not a cisgender woman. I am a transgender woman.

I do not understand it. You do not have to understand it either. I have read everything there is to be read on the causes of gender dysphoria, and as it relates to me, a lot of them seem plausible, even probable. Do I need to know if it was some hiccup in the second trimester of gestation or a genetic marker that caused me to be transgender? I’m curious, but I don’t need to know. I know testosterone was wrong and estrogen is right. Not many men would be happy losing their testosterone and having it replaced with estrogen, nor women losing their estrogen and having it replaced with testosterone. That alone is enough to assure me I am transgender.

There is a certain segment of the left that leans toward a strange form of isolationism. They say, “No one who is not transgender can understand what my life is like, so don’t even try.” It is a form of what Mounk calls Identity Synthesis, in which we are identified only by that which separates us from everyone else. From that perspective the only appropriate way to interact with a transgender person is to acquiesce to whatever we say, because we are the minority. Question our perspective and you become a part of the majority culture oppressing us. Since transgender people are about one half of one percent of the population, by the logic of Identity Synthesis, 199 out of 200 people can never understand us.

Uh, okay. The truth is I don’t even understand me. I’ve had the same therapist for 30 years and we’re still trying to figure it out. It is okay, you don’t know why you do half the stuff you do, either. We are all complex and mysterious and difficult to understand.

Like Mounk, I am a fan of classic liberalism. I prefer the kind of language you heard from Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Junior, and come to think of it, Jesus. As members of this species, we all have more in common than we have that separates us. We will never bridge a divide by increasing the divide. We will bridge it by coming together in the areas we hold in common.

Are transgender people oppressed? Yes. Do I experience oppression? Again, yes. But I brought a lot of White male entitlement with me when I transitioned, and that also plays a part in how I experience life. Oppression is bad all the time, wherever and whenever it is experienced. But I don’t think we end oppression by increasing the divide.

I get paid a lot of money to speak at universities. As long as they do not censor me, I speak at Christian universities pro bono. I haven’t upset anybody yet with what I have said from the platform, though my sheer existence has threatened a lot of people who want to say gender dysphoria is not legitimate.

Why do I go to these institutions pro bono? Because if we do not get in close proximity to one another and discover that our commonality exceeds our differences, we will never close the divide. We need to close the divide. We need to stop arguing about who can use which restroom and focus on the real problems that could destroy our planet.

Climate change is rapidly hitting the point of no return. Probably not the time to buy that beachfront property you’ve been dreaming of. There are two wholly unnecessary wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, and countless other rumors of war.  Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly more complex as headlines blare the news that computers could one day overpower and even exterminate our species. One expert says the chances of that happening are somewhere between two percent and fifty percent. Truly frightening. What do you say we battle those problems instead of widening the great cultural divide.

Classic liberalism believes all humans are created equal, with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those words are just as important today as they were 250 years ago. I want to embrace and extend that message.

I am first a human, Paula Stone Williams. After that I am everything else – tall, white, curly headed, transgender, American, Christian, pastoral counselor, speaker’s coach, TED speaker, member of the Lyons Board of Trustees, and longsuffering New York Mets fan. But for all of those particularities, what I hold in common with you far exceeds that which separates us. That is the truth I want to champion. That is the way we close the divide.

And so it goes.

Envision Community Church, formerly Left Hand Church,  closed its doors last Sunday. In her part of the message, Kristie Vernon, my co-pastor, prepared us for endings, remembrance, and new beginnings. I returned to the first passage I ever preached, Matthew 22, in which Jesus finished his public ministry by asking people to love God, neighbor, and self. I ended with the words I have spoken so often, “God loves you, just as you are, no questions asked, no changes demanded.”

The music was perfect. Four-part harmony with Heatherlyn, Haley, Liam, and Cairn. Jason provided impeccable sound and video, as always. We had 77 people in attendance at the final service, probably about the size of the congregation toward the end.

Kristie presided over communion. Tonja, one of our elders, served communion with her. John and Nicole, two of our former co-pastors, joined us. We ate a closing meal together and announced that we will be starting monthly community dinners on January 7, followed by a book study the next month. We are not continuing Envision Community Church. There will be no pastors, board, or budget, just a community gathering in which ECC folks can gather and do life together.

Our worship services will not continue. I have been around church my entire life. I’ve preached in megachurches, rural churches, small congregations, new churches and old ones. I have not been in many, of any size, that maintained the quality of worship we had at ECC. For 301 weekly services we provided great music, thoughtful messages, communion, and community. You do not find churches like that on every corner.

Over six years Kristie, Nicole, John, and Jen shared preaching duties with me. Tonja, Stacy, and Lonni also preached on occasion. Heatherlyn was our worship pastor from the beginning of weekly services.

Over the life of ECC, I’ve gotten stronger as a preacher. I am going to miss speaking regularly to the same group of people, allowing me to build layer upon layer. You can only do that when an audience has heard scores of messages delivered in real time as the world unfolds around us. I will miss that a immensely.

I will greatly miss working with Kristie. We have been a good team. We have worked through a lot of difficult times and slayed lots of dragons. A bond forms when you slay dragons. I would gladly work with her again. I also really enjoyed working with Nicole and John. What a delight watching all of them grow as preachers and pastors.

Our community will continue. We will be meeting the first Sunday of every month for a community dinner. Kristie is hosting on January 7 and I’ll be hosting on February 4. I will also be starting a book club after the first of the year.

A few friends have asked if I believe church as we have known it is sustainable in America in a post-covid world. I would not look at Left Hand/ECC for guidance. There were too many things working against us from the beginning. But at a macro level, there is handwriting on the wall. For the better part of a century 70 percent of Americans identified with a local religious body. In just 22 years, 1999 to 2021, that dropped to 47 percent. The increasing politicization of the Christian right has been a contributor. Covid certainly didn’t help, as people got accustomed to hanging out at home on Sunday. I personally believe that the substitutionary atonement theory still being taught in conservative churches is a contributing factor. In today’s world it’s hard to imagine a Creator who sends their own offspring to hell. Unless you are steeped in the doctrine and understand the history of blood sacrifices, it just makes no common sense.

Left Hand/ECC and churches like us are all missing one of the elements that guarantees church attendance. If you are afraid of going to hell, you tend to attend church every week and give ten percent of your income to the church. You know, life insurance. If you do not believe you are in danger of going to hell, you attend for more of the reasons Jesus talked about. You know, like loving God, and your neighbor, and yourself. Not nearly as compelling as religion as a transaction, a commodity to be consumed – eternal life insurance.

I believe the religious right has damaged Christianity, whether it’s the far right Protestant or Roman Catholic worlds. That world is angry, judgmental, polarizing, and exclusive. It has also become very political. Evangelicals are the people driving the anti-transgender laws. Eighty-seven percent of them believe gender is immutably determined at birth; 67 percent believe we already give too many civil rights to transgender people, and only 31 percent know someone who is out as a transgender person.

In spite of the current political/religious environment, I do still believe in the church. I believe it is where we search for meaning in community, where we learn to do life together, where we feed the poor, heal the wounded, and do other good work that is more effectively done in community than alone.

Is today’s church what Jesus had in mind? He certainly envisioned a community of followers, but how that might have looked in his mind is not really all that clear, much as we would like to think that it is. Will I still be a part of the church? Certainly! I believe in it. Am I sad we closed the doors at Left Hand/ECC? Yes, I am, and yet Kristie and I played a major part in the decision to close. We knew it was time.

Life is full of times of letting go. I’ve discovered letting go with mercy and grace is always the preferred pathway.

And so it goes.

Six years ago we launched Left Hand Church (now Envision Community Church) in Longmont, Colorado. We were excited, but cautious. After 35 years in the world of church planting, I was accustomed to starting churches with a budget of 800k, a full staff of five pastors, and a sizeable advertising budget. We hired well and those churches tended to grow pretty large pretty fast. Good times.

We started Left Hand with about 80k, a full zero less than my previous life. We started with three part-time co-pastors, a worship pastor, and a children’s minister. Total annual budget – less than 100k. We began with no nucleus of people from an existing church. How could this work?

Well, in short, it worked. The first two years brought steady growth through word of mouth, until we had about 125 people and a regular attendance in the mid-80s. Then we were hit with the unprecedented challenges of Covid-19, coupled with a staff turnover, and returned in the spring of 2021 with about half the people we had before the pandemic. That was typical of most churches in America. But when you are small to start with, it makes it even harder.

We came out of the pandemic with a great new space, imagined by one of our co-pastors and built at her direction with a team of volunteers. Worship services became stronger while attendance got smaller. We were holding on to younger and older singles and couples, but we weren’t holding onto families with children. We had a congregation of committed people and the finances remained strong, but once our attendance dropped into the 30s, we knew it was not sustainable over the long haul.

Our elders opted for organic growth over raising money for a full-time pastor and an advertising blitz, which was a decision they had every right to make. I did not oppose it. Trying to push growth plans that do not excite the volunteer leaders is about as effective as pushing a rope.

Worship has been wonderful all summer and fall, some of our best services ever. The spirit has been marvelous. And yet, a church with an average attendance in the 30s is not sustainable. Kristie, my co-pastor, and I knew it. A couple of weeks ago we realized it was time to close the church.  We wanted to close when things were good and we had enough financial resources to give generous severances to our staff who depend on their church income, and to complete our other obligations as well.

In all my years with the Orchard Group, I think we closed one English-speaking church. But then again, there were those big dollars with which we started each church. We never had that at ECC, and it’s okay.

For six years and 300 worship services, Envision Community Church has met needs and created community for hundreds of people. Most of my time with the church brought great joy. Some of it did not. But the parts that did not were important learning experiences. Can’t say I enjoyed them all that much, but I did a lot of growing.

For the better part of 60 years, pretty much everything I touched turned to at least silver, if not gold. It has not been that way as Paula. I discovered that people overlook the flaws of a white man a whole lot more than they do a transgender woman. I hear from cis women all the time that the same is true for them. So often men get a free pass, but that is another post for another day.

We do have a strong congregation with a lot of love holding us together. I am confident our people will find avenues to connect in meaningful ways. I imagine a lot of the formal and informal affinity groups will remain intact and even grow. We’ve got a lot of folks highly motivated for community.

As for me, there are a few things I know. I know for all of my TED and TEDx service, my work on the town board, my counseling practice, and my consulting work, none of them bring the kind of joy that comes from preaching. I was made to preach. I know that. It is my most forgetful place, where I disappear into a sacred space. It is where I am consumed in all the best of ways.

I will look for opportunities to preach around the region and the nation, just as I have done over the past ten years. I have a great relationship with several progressive churches that have told me they’d be happy to have me speak for them a few times a year. That makes me happy. I’ll also find ways to serve the folks I’ve been serving here for the past six years. I love them a lot, and want to remain in their lives.

I will preach my final regular sermon this coming Sunday. I finished it today. I’ll memorize it tomorrow and Thursday. I will cry when I preach it because, well, because.

Kristie and I will both speak at our last service. I am glad we both stayed to the end.  Our two post-covid co-pastors, Nicole and John, will join us for the service. We’ll have a potluck dinner afterwards, and then Kristie and I will get about the work of closing accounts and websites and readying the chapel for its return to the UCC church that has so graciously rented the space to us.

For everything there is a season. I always loved that song by the Birds. I think I was in college before I realized the lyrics came from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes.

To everything – turn, turn, turn

There is a season – turn, turn, turn

And a time for every person under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die

A time to plant, a time to reap

A time to laugh, a time to weep 

A time to build up, a time to break down

A time to dance, a time to mourn

A time to cast away stones

A time to gather stones together

To everything – turn, turn, turn

There is a season – turn, turn, turn

And a time for every person under heaven

Envision Community Church has had its time, and a wonderful time it has been. May our memories of her be fond and may we all have learned just a little bit more about loving God, loving neighbor, and loving our own selves.

And so it goes.