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.

I did not know it was possible, a mainline church that was growing, vibrant, socially active, multi-generational, theologically progressive, and quite large. Plymouth United Church of Christ in Des Moines, Iowa is a delightful congregation that gives me great hope that traditional theologically liberal mainline churches are not all in decline.

It was my privilege to be with the good folks in Des Moines a couple of weeks ago. I preached for their contemporary worship service on Saturday, and for both traditional services on Sunday. Sunday’s 9:00 am service included two youth choirs with scores of young people. The 11:00 am service included a chancel choir that was every bit as good as any I’ve heard in a church anywhere. The building was full for both services.

I also had the privilege of speaking to a between-services group of about 50, and a whole church luncheon after the second worship service. I definitely used up my allotment of words in my five speaking opportunities, and answered probing questions asked by knowledgeable folks who surprised me with their understanding of the issues facing the queer community. Jared Wortman, the senior pastor, is well-educated, brilliant, and pretty-much half my age. I don’t know how you amass a library that large when you are that young.

I have seen the statistics. Throughout most of the twentieth century seventy-percent of Americans identified with a local religious body. Between 1999 and 2021 that number dropped to 47 percent. That is a 23 point percentage drop in 22 years, by any measurement a precipitous decline.

Our species never began to thrive until we moved from the level of blood kin to the level of tribe. That is when civilizations began to develop and huge strides forward became the norm. What brought us together as tribes? As I’ve written before, it was not man’s need for safety, it was man’s search for meaning. We have always best searched for meaning in community. The myth of the ruggedly individual American is just that, a myth. We have always come together in community to seek meaning.

If we look at the period after World War I we see the great joining of America. It was not just houses of worship that benefitted, it was all social networks, from the Rotary Club to the Kiwanis, Masons, Elks, and Shriners. Today they are all in decline. The builder generation, those born before 1946 were the last to participate in community gatherings at such a high level, the church included.

The last quarter century has seen huge changes in how we do community. More time is spent at work, often in multiple jobs. More parents are involved in their children’s sports, and not in their own social clubs and endeavors. Extended families no longer participate in life together, be it church, synagogue, or any other social endeavor. The church has suffered, and I believe humanity has suffered.

We were made for community, and thrive within it. It is where we cross-pollinate and grow. It is where we challenge and are challenged. It is where we bond together as a cosmic benevolent force, or a cosmic malevolent force, depending on the nature of the community of which we are a part. I believe we need the church, so when I see a congregation like Plymouth, I am buoyed.

Maybe left-leaning mainline Protestantism is not dead. Maybe it can help restore the notion that we have more in common than what separates us, that the extremes of standpoint theory, or progressive separatism can be countered by those committed to core universal principles. What guarantees a strong future are communities that foster real integration and encourage people to find what they have in common, not what separates them.

From all appearances, Plymouth UCC is one such community. I am by nature an optimist. It is difficult to be very optimistic in America nowadays. My weekend in Des Moines renewed my optimism, as did the next week at TEDWomen and the following weekend at the Evolving Faith Conference in Minneapolis.

On dark days we all need glimmers of light. That is where the hope lies. Thank you Jared, and the good people of Plymouth UCC for being a glimmer of light for me.

And so it goes.

Turns out we cannot turn loose of Jesus. The 1,200 or so people at the Evolving Faith Conference this past weekend, and the larger number watching online, just can’t turn loose of Jesus. Most of us come from evangelical backgrounds, and while we’ve jettisoned the baggage of fundamentalism, we have somehow managed not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

James Fowler’s book Stages of Faith is a classic. He describes the stages of faith development with the language of a social scientist. The first two stages are the magical faith of children. First, mom and dad are the gods, quickly exchanged for dinosaurs and such. Stage three is where a lot of folks get stuck. It is traditional faith, full of rules and regulations and angry gods, reluctant to allow anyone onto their heavenly real estate.

On this side of the Abrahamic divide, stage three residents are evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. The fundamentalists are a tad more conservative than their evangelical cousins, though evangelicalism has taken a hard right turn over the last couple of decades. Thanks Paige Patterson, Focus on the Family, Franklin Graham… Well, I shouldn’t have started listing them. We’d be here all day.

Stage four is the stage of disenchantment, in which we begin to question the duality of in/out theology and reject the notion of an angry God who would fry his own offspring. In America most people get stuck in stage four, sometimes smugly so. I was talking with a woman who said, “My first Sunday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I went to mass. The second Sunday I stayed in bed. I’ve ever been back.”

Since we’ve always best worked out the meaning of life in community, I find that sad. I also find sad the statistic that throughout the 20th century 70 percent of Americans had a local religious community to which they belonged. Between 1999 and 2021, that dropped to 47 percent, not a good sign for organized religion.

Some people still recognize that community is the best place in which to work out life’s meaning, and those good people move on to Fowler’s stage five, in which there is a re-enchantment of faith. The journey is usually back to the religion of childhood, but with a much broader, non-dualistic perspective. If you happened to be raised Christian, then it’s a return to Christ, but it’s the Christ described by Richard Rohr in the Cosmic Christ, not the Christ of fundamentalism.

Those are the folks I was with in Minneapolis, post-evangelicals who made it through stage four and on to stage five because they never lost sight of Jesus. You know, the one who on his last day of public ministry said religion is all about loving God, neighbor, and self, and said it so convincingly that from that day on, no one dared to ask him any more questions.

We listened to preachers like Sarah Bessey, Alicia Crosby Mack, Randy Woodley, Amy Kenny, Krista Tippett, and in the session I preached in, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wil Gafney, Joyce del Rosario, and yours truly. We had long conversations and bought lots of books (it was kinda nice to have both my book sell out and Jonathan’s as well.)  And we talked a lot about Jesus.

What brought me to tears was none of that, rich and salient as the sermons were. What brought me to tears was 1,200 people singing How Great Thou Art in four-part harmony, while The Many led us with the heartfelt fervor of old time revival musicians .

Pretty much everyone in attendance came from the same stock, generations of families capable of singing all four verses in four-part harmony without opening a hymnal. I wept for the memories of good people with a simple, yet powerful faith, formed through generations spent in communities of faith, whether in urban neighborhoods, rural white clapboard church buildings, or suburban sprawls.

The old time religion does not work for these folks anymore, stage three a distant memory. But the music still has power, words redolent with meaning beyond most worship songs written in the last half century. We sang with joy and sorrow. Joy that we had found one another. Sorrow that we have lost so many who have not joined us on the road less traveled by.

After the conference ended, a number of the speakers and musicians gathered for dinner at the hotel where we stayed. Eating together, talking about our love for the church, glad to be rid of the rage and anger that had driven us in stage four, showing grace for those still there. It was all so good.

My week began at a thriving mainline UCC church in Iowa (I will write about that next week) followed by TEDWomen in Atlanta (I will write about that the following week,) and ended with the strains of How Great Thou Art in the Minneapolis convention center.

Fate had it that Dr. Wil Gafney, my fellow-speaker on Saturday, was on my flight from Minneapolis to Dallas. For three hours we talked animatedly of life and its joys, both buoyed by our time at Evolving Faith. As I bade her farewell at Dallas, to head to my connecting flight to Denver, these words were on my lips,

Then sings my soul, my savior God to thee

How great Thou art, how great Thou art

Then sings my soul, my savior God to thee

How great Thou art, How Great Thou Art!

The phrase has become as common as the air we breathe. Whether on the right or left, old or young, everyone talks about “my truth” and “your truth.” The first time I heard the term was when Oprah used it on her show fifteen or twenty years ago. I thought, “Oh dear God, don’t let this catch on.”

It caught on. The octogenarian with whom I occasionally have lunch, many of the people in my church (maybe most of them), my granddaughters, and every pundit on television all talk about “your truth.” I’ve even heard fellow-counselors use the term. “My truth” and “your truth” has entered the American lexicon without so much as a whimper. Well, I’m whimpering.

It all began with the discoveries of Quantum physics and the arrival of postmodernism. Physicists discovered objective truth does not exist. The scientist is always a part of the equation. Subatomic particles do different things depending on whether or not they are being observed. The scientist, with his or her purposes, is always a part of the observation.

I liked the way a friend of mine put it in the 1990s in a book chapter on postmodern apologetics, There Is No Such Thing as Objective Truth, and It’s a Good Thing, Too. I loved the chapter. As long as humans or anything created by humans is involved in the measurement, objective truth is not attainable.

The problem is with dualistic thinking. If the only option is dualistic thinking, then if something is not objectively true, it is not true at all. It’s objective truth or nothing. That is what professors in my conservative seminary taught, the all or nothing plan. Such dualistic thinking is neat and tidy, but it does not square with life as we live it.

Recently the British Prime Minister succumbed to the same mistake so many other conservative politicians have made. He is quoted as saying, “There are males and females and that’s it. It’s common sense.” Except it is not. There are dozens of intersex conditions, and study after study show gender is a spectrum. It is the same as saying, “There’s straight and there’s gay and nothing in between.” You won’t find many takers for that statement. We know a lot about bisexuality and many of the other subtleties of sexual identity.

But back to the notion of truth. Those who depend on dualistic thinking have quite a dilemma. If something is not objectively true, then there is no such thing as truth. That is the narrative that has won the day in America, hence the capitulation to “my truth” and “your truth.”

Just because absolute truth or objective truth is not possible, it does not mean we cannot attain something extremely close to objective truth. My friend’s article suggested we name it, “rigorous intersubjective truth.” In other words, with every tool available, we get as close to objective truth as is humanly possible.

That is the kind of truth we’ve been building civilizations upon for millennia. It is the truth obtainable through the scientific method. It has brought us cures for cancer, trips to the moon, the JWST telescope, cell phones, and the computer you’re probably reading this blogpost on.

The truth is determined to be that which is generally agreed upon through rigorous intersubjective study. Some things require more study than others – say Chaos Theory or the Big Bang. Others are fairly simple, like the fact that the New York Mets were terrible this year. Doesn’t take a lot of intersubjective study to reach that conclusion.

All of this to say that truth is best modified by the word “the” and not the words “your” or “my.” Postmodernism, with its need to deconstruct anything and everything, is obsessed with the slippery nature of truth. After the modern age and its conviction about the immutability of reason, I understand this tendency to ride the pendulum to the other extreme. But just because every culture, ethnicity, and people group has its own perspective that will shade the truth, a perspective that needs to be taken into account, it does not mean there is no such thing as truth.

I believe when most people say “my truth” or “your truth” what they are actually referring to is not truth at all, but their preference. I believe green is the prettiest color. You might believe blue is the prettiest color. We each have a preference and opinion, but it is not the truth. The truth is that green and blue are colors, period.

I’m reading a marvelous new book by Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap. He speaks eloquently and I believe accurately about the state of communication and truth in these tumultuous times. He believes giving up on the notion of truth will not bring us together. It will only separate us, just as giving up on the notion that there is more that unites us than separates us, will also keep feeding America’s ever-increasing divide.

I believe there is more that unites us than separates us, and I believe that is the truth.

What might I offer that few others can? That is the question that led me to tailor my counseling practice toward executives, to focus my public speaking on gender equity, to find pleasure coaching speakers, and to lead in the post-evangelical church. I want my contributions to be value added to the lives of others.

I am a Christian. Even after all the awful ways in which I have been treated by the church, I still believe in the message of Jesus, particularly in the last public answers he ever gave, in which he spoke about loving God, neighbor, and self. At Envision Community Church, I define loving God as, “loving the God who burst on the scene 14 billion years ago in all of God’s complexity, mystery, and ever-expansiveness, rooted in relationship and grounded in love.” I define loving neighbor as, “loving every human being with whom you come in contact, particularly those who do not look like you.” Concerning loving yourself I say, “You cannot do the first two if you cannot do the third. It all starts with loving yourself.”

That final public bow in which he spoke those words is the core message of Jesus, and my starting point in matters of faith. I spent decades in the evangelical world. There is a lot I miss. I love megachurch worship services with great music, well-crafted substantive messages, and abundant awe. Excellence is assumed, and I believe that is important. I like how those churches draw people into community. I appreciate their local church polity, and boards that adopt Policy Governance.

Those are all reasons I prefer post-evangelical churches to churches affiliated with mainline Protestant denominations. There aren’t many independent post-evangelical churches, and none of us know what we’re doing really, particularly in a nation in which we have gone from 70 percent of citizens affiliated with a local religious body, to 47 percent having a local church, synagogue, or mosque. Add Covid to the mix and you have a lot of pastors scratching their heads. The churches on the far right keep the flock loyal by stoking fear with misinformation, but Millennials and GenZ are over that. Only the Baby Boomers get jazzed by the marriage of church and state.

Our species never took off until we moved from the level of blood kin to the level of tribe, and what brought us into community was not our need for safety, but man’s search for meaning. Our search for meaning has always gone better when approached in community. That is difficult to do in post-Covid America, with its strong individualism and fresh cuttings of isolationism.

People who are not in religious community get stuck in Fowler’s Stage Four of faith development, the stage of disenchantment and skepticism. I was at a dinner last month in which a woman said, “I went to church every Sunday until I got to college. I got up and went to mass the first Sunday I was at school. The second Sunday I did not, and I never have again.” She spoke triumphantly, as if she had arrived at an important insight. I’d suggest she arrived at a cul-de-sac of ennui. The expansive spirituality of Fowler’s Stage Five is out of reach for those who reject spiritual community, to say nothing of the elusive Stage Six.

I visited an old friend from my former denomination the other day. I realized just how much information I have about that denomination, its idiosyncrasies, history, leadership, theology, and all the other miscellany that comes from 40 years of work in a field. All is lost. No one in my new world is interested in that information. They consider it to be esoteric, and its lessons outdated. It is rare when anyone from that world reaches out to me. This friend suggested that someday I might be invited back to the denomination’s national conference. I told him I was very confident I would not live long enough to see that happen, and I have really good genes. My children will also not live long enough to hear my name spoken in a positive light from within that denomination. I have made peace with that reality.

Nevertheless, I am still taken by this man, Jesus, and the community that formed around his teachings. I want to bring my 40 years of religious knowledge and wisdom into this new post-evangelical world, and bring hope to turbulent times.

As for now, these are the areas on which I want to focus as I offer my unique gifts to those who might find the wisdom of those gifts helpful. I want to provide spiritual direction and therapy, to speak on issues related to gender equity, to coach speakers, to lead a spiritual community, and to always be open to new opportunities of service.

I also hold close those friends and family who take the path less traveled by, who are unafraid to look at life without a rose-colored filter, who are focused less on happiness and more on peace, less on satisfying their ego needs, and more on satisfying their souls.

I have fewer friends, but deeper friendships. Pretty much all of those friends are restless, as am I, uncomfortable that at this advanced age we are still called anew onto the Hero’s Journey, with its road of trials and dark cave. But we know you cannot stop the journey prematurely, even if you are tired, even if you are exhausted. You must answer the call not because you are indispensable, but because you are dispensable,  and you want to offer what you can for as long as you can.

One last thing about this encore. I believe it is important to find something to do that you have never done before. I ran for public office in my Front Range town nestled in the foothills of the Rockies. For the first six months in office I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know a resolution from an ordinance. A year and a half in, I’m figuring out the lay of the land, and yes, I plan to run again. Will I be elected? Who knows? There are those who think our entire board is incompetent. I think we’re actually pretty good. We certainly are all on the same page, which has made a lot of people happy, and allowed us to do much good work. Do I enjoy politics? I can’t say I do. But learning something completely new, and helping my town in the process is worth it, even if meetings stretch into all hours of the night.

I tell people nowadays that I am semi-retired. All that means is that I no longer do much of anything I do not want to do. I fill my days serving within my areas of expertise, doing work that satisfies my soul, and always looking beyond the horizon for the next thing.

It has been a challenge to prepare for an encore life. I am not sure I would have chosen to do so, but my rejection by the many forced me to begin anew. So often we do not seek the road less traveled by. It is thrust upon us. But ten years into this encore life, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

And so it goes.

This week, part two of “Time for an Encore.”

During this period of taking stock and the first letting go, I asked a second question, “What do I really want?” The limelight and I are friends. Being seen and appreciated has always been more important than being well-compensated. I grew up in a world in which it was considered a sin to be ambitious or to seek an audience. Those were signs of the sin of pride.  A favorite phrase of my family, common in Appalachia, was, “Don’t get too big for your britches.” It was all right to do well singing a solo at your elementary school concert. It was not alright to bask in the applause. My mother saw it as her job to make sure I did not get too big for my britches. She excelled at the task. But I loved an audience. I loved discovering I could hold the attention of a group of people just by singing a song or telling a story. And I always wanted to do it in such a way that someone felt better than when they started their day.

In my forties I identified a life phrase that guided my work. It was an unusual phrase I suppose – to lessen spiritual suffering. As I developed my pastoral counseling practice, the phrase continued to guide me and I chose to specialize in healing spiritual trauma. Making people happy is elusive. Lessening unnecessary suffering is more attainable, at least most of the time. It is never easy, but it is worthy.

Which brought me to the third question, “What should I do?” I needed to do the second letting go, this time not age related, but leaving the past behind to live authentically into an uncertain future. (You never attain authenticity. You can only live authentically.) I knew I had to come out as transgender and within seven days lost every one of my jobs and hundreds, if not thousands, of friends.

That experience is captured in my first two TEDTalks. It is more completely chronicled in my memoir, As a Woman, What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned.

Life in the Liminal Space

When I came out, I was still not certain I was going to transition. After losing all of my jobs and most of my friends, I tried one more time, for three months, to live as Paul. It was not sustainable, and oh, there is so much in that sentence.

I returned to my chameleon-like life transitioning back and forth. It is a blur, remembered through a glass darkly. On one side was the elation of letting go and moving in the direction of authenticity. On the other side was the pain of discontinuity that signaled a life lost, never to return. I was a transgender woman on a desert island with no accessible past and a supremely uncertain future.

I am now ten years post-transition, and in retrospect I can see that I exited this difficult transitional space incrementally. The first phase took three years. The second, another four, and the third phase, a very difficult two years.

During those last two years I learned the importance of identifying what was and was not within my control. As a white male, I had far more control than I have as a woman. I had to accept reality and acknowledge what had happened and where it deposited me. I had to live my life as it was, in the present moment. It did not help to blame others. It did help to take inventory of the events and their causes and accept them. I had little choice but to live my life as it was, in the present moment. That was when I frequented David Wagoner’s Poem, Lost.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost

Wherever you are is called Here, you must treat it as a powerful stranger

Must ask its permission to know it and be known

Listen, the forest breathes; it whispers “I have made this place around you

If you leave, you may return again saying, Here

No two trees are the same to Raven; no two branches are the same to Wren

If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you, then you are surely lost

What do you do when you’re lost in the forest? Stand still

The forest knows where you are; you must let it find you

Those last two years may have been the two hardest years of my life. I had to take stock yet again. I discovered taking stock and letting go are essential skills to develop on the road less traveled by.

During that time I had to come to grips with what Jungian analyst James Hollis calls existential guilt. It is the recognition that some personality traits have been with me for as long as I can remember and are likely to remain with me for as long as I live. They are not positive traits. I call them my abiding shadows. And the best I can hope for is to be able to identify them, all of them, and lock them in the basement, knowing damn well that they will find their way out. When that happens, my task is to catch them before they’ve done much damage and lock them in the basement again. There is no joy in this, only the abiding desire to unleash a bit less suffering into the world.

Toward the end of that two year period, I kept returning to two stanzas from William Butler Yeats’s poem, Vacillation.

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

Although the summer Sunlight gild

Cloudy leafage of the sky,

Or wintry moonlight sink the field

In storm-scattered intricacy,

I cannot look thereon,

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled. 

Next week, Part 3.

Carl Jung said, “You cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning.”

I was the CEO of a tiny non-profit that grew from a budget of 200k to 4m. I was CEO or Chair for 25 of the 35 years I worked there. When I began I wanted what the young want – affirmation, status, and income that would give my family a comfortable life.

The organization expanded from Long Island to working across the nation, as well as beginning a few ventures overseas. But in my industry, it was rare for someone to stay in the CEO position beyond their mid-60s. In my mid-50s, I knew it was time to prepare for a new chapter. I went back to seminary and ten days after I turned 61, received my Doctor of Ministry degree in Pastor Care. Six months earlier I had stepped down as CEO and became non-executive chair. That was my first letting go.

I have always been a Renaissance person, and in addition to my leadership of the non-profit, I also worked as the editor-at-large of a magazine, and on the teaching team of a couple of megachurches. I was a national leader and knew well over a thousand people by name.

My second letting go was radical, the kind of letting go that happens after you’ve come to the stark realization that your ladder to the heavens has been leaning against the wrong wall.

I announced to the world that I was transgender. A year later I transitioned genders. I lost all of my jobs within 24 hours, and my pension. I even had to fight to get back hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been designated for my own salary. Those thousands of people I knew? In the ten years since my transition, I’ve had substantive conversations with exactly six of them.

One life ended – completely, which is unusual. Most of us go through multiple transitions during our lives, but there is a certain continuity on which we can depend. Friendships remain. Family is still intact. We may stay in the same industry. There is an unbroken line to our lives.

 In my case, there was almost no continuity, no unbroken line. I lost every one of my jobs. My marriage ended (though we remain close) and pretty much my entire work world abandoned me. If there was to be an encore life, it would have to begin from scratch. What do you do when you are 62 and have to start a new life from scratch?

I had known for some time that my theology was moving left of what was acceptable in my denomination. I thought I could bring about change from within. Whatever change did occur was incremental, and dictated by the whims of financial expediency. It was not enough. A non-profit cannot survive without donations. After transitioning, going back into the evangelical world was impossible, and I did not want to move into any area that might satisfy my ego but not my soul.

The Jungian analyst James Hollis said the soul is interested in two things – power and safety. After you’ve lost everything, the last thing you are concerned about is power and safety. They are out of reach, and you painfully know it. Your ego has been defeated, which is a good thing, and you no longer focus on power and safety. The desires of the ego seem remote.

When forced into a major defeat that brings disruption and discontinuity, one’s ego finally fades and one’s soul emerges. It is not because your better angels take over. It is because it takes defeat of the ego to free the soul. Your ego has always wanted the retirement benefits. Your soul has always been here for the ride.

As I said, as a young person I wanted pretty much what everyone else wants, affirmation, status, and to provide for my family. My background and culture established the goals. The main question was, “How do I achieve those goals?”

As I approached my sixties, the question was no longer how. The question was why? Why did I arrive here and more importantly, for what purpose? I asked three questions:

1. Who am I?
2. What do I really want?
3. What should I do?

The first was powerfully difficult to accept and even more difficult to act upon. I knew from the time I was three or four I was transgender, but it was not until I was watching LOST, my favorite television show of all time, that I thought of the three questions related to my identity. Who am I at my core? Who is the visible me? Who is the best me?

My core self is incorporated in a line in my first TEDTalk. It is also the dedication line of my memoir, As a Woman. The line is,  “The call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good.” My core self was Paula. Which meant my visible self needed to be Paula. Which meant my best self could only be born out of Paula. My life, as I knew it, was over.

And as for this week’s post, I’ll leave you there. I’ll pick this up next week.

And so it goes…