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The Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City is a little urban congregation just off California Highway 15 in San Diego. It is a humble church, a broken church, far from ideal. Between cracked brick walls tagged by turf-contending neighborhood gangs, regret and gratitude, shame and joy, probability and possibility contend. Occasionally, fragmentarily, this little church becomes the address at which something extraordinary occurs, the address at which the throats and hands of ordinary people open (perhaps without purpose or design) to speak and to act and thus to await the consecration of the labyrinth of its hospitable spaces.

Mid-City gathers weekly to worship in five different language groups. Its people variously articulate the good news and feast on the body and blood of Christ. Coordinated with a Lenten calendar, after prolonged catechesis, the church performs yearly baptisms, on Easter Sunday.119 Particularly on this day a baptizand stands up out of the water as a sign that light still shines in darkness, a sign that these whose destiny it is to assemble as the church have entered, and as the church are repeatedly to enter, into a work that is not their own, a sign that it is Christ’s work by which the people of this present evil age are reconciled both to Christ’s Father and with this Father to one another.

When the baptizand is led forward by her sponsor, the whole congregation is invited to celebrate in solidarity with her. They are to remember their entry into the work of this Christ. Constituted afresh, the church—embracing and embraced by those wet from the font—comes lightly to hold in its hands the manna it prays it will never presume to stockpile, the food of Christ’s work, the work that broke his body and spilled his blood. They come in this way, they are told, to be members of the body of the one who forevermore hangs in solidarity with a world plummeting into the abyss.120

Joining this church is joining the poor.121 Their prayer is that they would travel to where Jesus in the stories they rehearse has already gone, the Jesus into whom they have been baptized. The life of this church is dedicated publicly as a gift—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the imprisoned. Thus the church works to wait upon God’s coming, to trust in God’s good pleasure, to speak and act without the logic of violence, i.e., to hope. Praying that it might recognize that this is a way of life very different from the way of the principalities and powers, it works to speak and act with a direct and conscious difference from the technologies of violence, including institutions of national military service and social mobility. The church is disciplined—however unevenly—to depend on the grace of God, not the logic of might, status, and resources. The poor of the congregation are among its leaders. Church goods are offered to aid those whose lives have been thrown into turmoil by the competition, technologized efficiency, private property rights, monetized health care, consumerist desire, and work ethic of its neighborhood—the poor themselves sacrificing to others who are poor.

And so, on rainy days and nights the church leaves its doors open for shelter for those without roofs over their heads. Similarly, it leaves time open for prayer requests during its services. It is open to those engaged to be married—advising, guiding, and querying them as close friends do. Those members who have been graced each with a long sacramental marriage provide care for other lovers and beloveds before their promises fail and, breaking apart, one by one slip alone each into a separate despair. That is, in a great variety of ways the church shares a great variety of goods, face-to-face helping, befriending, and praying through the inevitable and often divisive conflicts that emerge between members of the assembly and between the assembly and those who stay consciously away from it.

And all of this is performed subtly, without pretense or ostentation. Anyone stumbling into one of its services would immediately recognize that there is something both faltering and delightfully extraordinary at play here. The sincerity of this work opens to the flesh as well as the Spirit. Facilities are in disrepair, banter erupts from a homeless congregant off her meds, persons without influence or power fill its pews, the thin walls that frame the sanctuaries let the sounds of drums and the voices that sing to their rhythms mingle with words preached in other languages a few yards away. Everything that takes shape here has the feel of a rough, ad hoc, beginner’s improvisational performance. People without homes find that they have cooked meals that have somehow made their way to other, hungry people. There are disagreements and tensions over how to take care of trivial matters (like who is to open the church when it rains or who is to lead the music during a worship service) or weightier ones (like a member who in dealing drugs is gambling with prolonged jail time and jeopardizing the welfare of her children). The church barely keeps afloat financially. There are sewage backups many Sunday mornings. Some of the old friends of the church have grown cold or uncooperative or hostile in part because of occasional eruptions of aggression, inflexibility, and meanness of spirit from those closest to the top on the church’s organizational charts and most visible on its raised platforms on Sunday mornings. The Spanish congregation struggles with its leadership; the French congregation is in the midst of a possible split; the new pastor of the Khmer congregation does his job in the wake of his predecessor, who left under a dark cloud of mistrust.

But something beautiful and holy happens, when during prayers one voice after another calls out to a holy Mystery—for the healing of a mother’s diseased body or the cessation of a war in a distant country or a change in city housing policy or the spiritual renewal of a friend or a safe home for the abandoned children cared for by the church or for the undocumented workers who continue to flood into the neighborhood. These are prayers entangled in the actions and passions of these people. “This is our prayer,” they call out; and the priestly reply joins their words, “Lord, hear our prayer!”

118. Mark 2:16: “When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax-collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’”

119. On Epiphany Sunday, congregants, adults and children, addled or clear-headed, who have not been baptized are invited to take the journey toward baptism. Those who respond are interviewed by their pastor. On Ash Wednesday a sponsor is assigned to provide the baptizand with support and guidance, meeting with her weekly or more often. Although this is a church that ordinarily invites all, baptized or not, to feast on the body and blood of Christ, she is asked to postpone her celebration of the eucharist on subsequent Sundays until she is baptized. Just after the Ministry of the Word each service from Epiphany through Holy Saturday she is invited to stand at a temporary distance from the rest of the assembly to meditate on the catechetical instruction she has received, attending in particular to Genesis 1–3, the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostles’ Creed. Holy Week services are given to the remembrance of Christ’s bloody baptism on the cross. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday services call the church to meditation on the abasement of Christ as the pattern of its discipleship. The congregation looks on these days to the baptizand as the icon of all the children of God, lost sheep found on Christ’s journey to the cross. Holy Saturday is in particular devoted to explicating the significance of baptism.

120. Cf. Barton, “Dislocating and Relocating Holiness,” 206; also Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 266–68.

121. Cf. Song, Jesus, the Crucified People, 216; and Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 236–37.