Dear J.D. Vance, You Got My Church Wrong

An open and personal letter to the Vice President

I don’t usually sit down and write letters to people in Washington. This week I’m making an exception, and before I do, I want to be clear about something. Our senior pastor, Adam Hamilton, is running for U.S. Senate here in Kansas, and I have intentionally said nothing publicly about that campaign since the day he announced it (until this week). I’m not endorsing him in this letter, and I’m not writing this on behalf of Church of the Resurrection. Our Church Council made a public statement here about the Vice President’s comments.

This is a personal letter and reflects my personal views only.

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Dear Mr. Vice President,

I live in Olathe, Kansas, and I watched the full video from the rally you held here last week. I want to tell you a few things about the church you talked about, because it’s clear you don’t know who we are. You said our faith tradition is “left-wing radicalism dressed in the skinsuit of our (your) religion.”

That’s not who we are, and I’d like to tell you why.

First of all, we’re a United Methodist church, and John Wesley started the Methodist movement in England a couple hundred years ago. He built the whole thing around three simple instructions he gave his people: Do no harm, do good, and stay close to God. That was the blueprint. And when Wesley said do good, he meant visiting people in prison, feeding people, or showing up for sick people nobody else wanted to be around. That’s the same DNA running through Church of the Resurrection today. It’s just old-fashioned love God and love your neighbor stuff, the same as it’s always been. It’s just that when we say neighbor, we think it means all neighbors. That might be where you and I see things a little differently.

Oh, and by the way, churches like ours are full of people who disagree with each other about plenty, including politics. Someone sitting two rows from me on any given Sunday might vote completely differently than I do, and we still share the same communion table without either of us pretending the other one doesn’t belong there. That’s actually one of the things I love most and find so beautiful about this place.

For what it’s worth, let me tell you what actually happened at our Downtown location this very week, since this stuff doesn’t make the news. A man wrote in and said he had never in his life felt as kind and generous a welcome as he found walking through our doors. Two of our congregants and a pastor dropped everything to sit at the bedside of a man experiencing homelessness in his final hours of a cancer battle so he wouldn’t die alone in a care facility. A handful of other congregants volunteered their time this week stocking a clothing closet with jackets and coats to get ready for winter. None of that is “left-wing radicalism” that is a threat to traditional Christianity.

Nobody’s asking you to agree with every position a mainline church or pastor might hold. That’s unrealistic. But I am asking you to stop pretending that the millions of mainline Protestants in this country are some kind of radical enemy to be feared. We’re a lot more complicated and a lot more human than that, and I think if you sat in one of our rows for a Sunday, you’d feel that pretty quickly.

Would you be willing to come see this place with your own eyes sometime? Come meet the people running our food pantry. Come sit with the folks who show up every month to serve our local partner schools. Sit down with me and hear about the six-week Bible class I’m teaching right now. I think you’d walk away with a completely different picture than the one you painted on that stage, and honestly, I’d love to be the one who shows you around.

Let me know.

Sincerely,

Beau Stringer

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