Be Yourself; Everyone Else is Taken

Back at City Church San Francisco for the First Time Since August 2022

I hadn’t visited the church I founded and pastored for 26 years since August 2022. My job has been to give my successor the space she needed to establish herself as the new Sr. Pastor. So, I was excited to be invited back to my former church to testify to what God has been up to in my life and where I see the Spirit leading me for the foreseeable future. It was great to see old friends and to see so many new faces.

The words I spoke were not words I could have envisioned saying in 1996 when I moved to San Francisco. I have changed so much. I’ve written and preached elsewhere about the nature of Christian spirituality, as always evolving, ever reforming, as the Spirit leads us.¹  In all of this, I’m trying to do the work of “being the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given to me at birth by God.” ² 

I was asked at a conference recently: “What’s it like to have handed over your life’s work to someone else?” I blurted out: “If the church I founded were my life’s work, I’d be devastated.” It was interesting to see the knowing agreement in the audience of those who had lived a little more life than some of the others.

There is a Hasidic tale that reveals both the universal tendency to want to be someone else and the necessity of becoming one's true self: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: `Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?" Or as Oscar Wilde put it: “Be yourself; everyone else is taken.”  That is my life’s work and yours too.

Here’s me being myself and testifying to the ongoing work of the Spirit in my life: 

Transcript:
I hear y'all have taken to hearing testimonies around here every week.  Well, here’s mine on this MLK weekend. 

If you don’t know the history of this church, you should. Not because it’s perfect and pristine but because it’s instructive.  

A young kid obsessed with who’s in and who’s out started this church in his living room on Lake St. in 1996.  While telling people all were welcome, that was not true. It was not intentional, but it was indeed false.  

Soon, a crowd formed in that living room, and we moved to the Presidio Chapel, where we grew to a crowd about this size. Then we moved here in December of 1997.   I joke that I started a church in the 1900s. :) 

And it grew and grew and grew.  We were up to 1200 on a Sunday, with around 2000 total people involved. Some of you were here for that chapter.  I’m grateful God always and only uses crooked sticks to draw straight lines. God insists on doing God’s work of renewal despite our distorted takes on what God’s renewal looks like.  

I believe you have to honor the past to understand your way forward. While that past was marked by exclusion, God was patiently at work anyway. Thank God.  

But something happened in 2010.  I was seen for the first time.  A therapist saw me as the wounded, repressed little boy that I was… who had been wounded horribly and tragically as a 5-year-old. I discovered the power of being fully seen, known, and loved.  The gospel that I had preached here for all those years that God sees you knows you, and fully loves you finally hit home for me.  

Then, everything began to change for me as a pastor. I wanted everyone to be seen, known and loved.  I wanted everyone to know that God saw them and loved them unconditionally. And a funny thing happened. I learned that’s not a way to grow a big church. 

It’s a problem for our species. Something deep in us is soothed by excluding others. Being ‘in’, while noticing others are ‘out’ can draw a big crowd. But the better news, what Jesus called the good news, is just so much better than ‘good.’  I had completely missed the message of Jesus: Everybody’s In, Nobody’s Out. 

If you were here before 2010 and are still here now, you bore witness to my (admittedly clumsy)  passion growing about this. It culminated in 2015 with our Elder Board’s insistence that LGBTQ beloveds know they are fully included here. And we proceeded to have a “Scottish Revival” (that’s Presbyterian humor for you).  We shrunk significantly.  Our species doesn’t do well with inclusion. It’s just so hard and uncomfortable. Unsettling. Disruptive. 

But, if embraced, transformative. To align yourself with God’s inclusive love always is. It will be both more lonely and more life-giving than you can imagine. And it was for us. Each Sunday after 2015 was tears and joy.  I think that’s maybe the way the church should be.  A reflection of life on this God-forsaken and God-filled earth we live on. 

In my 60s, I’ve dedicated my life to inclusive communities and the pastors who lead them. This is still the fire that animates me every day. I want everyone to know they are seen, known, and loved. I want everyone to know what St. Hagar taught us about God when she, after Abraham and Sarah ‘colonized her body to gestate their hopes’ in the words of Wil Gafney, was run out of town discarded, raped, abused by religious zealots… and was visited by God. Attended to by God. Nurtured by God in her infinite wisdom.  Hagar, the most important person in the Bible to me outside of Jesus, named God before all the dudes chimed in.  It’s the best name, the only name anyone gave God in Scripture. 

El Roi.  The God who sees me.  

I’ve given my life to starting churches that do the same. I am crazy enough to think it will change the world. A world that seems hell-bent on destroying itself over who’s in and who’s out.  I’d love to tell you more about it over lunch. Please join me. And it’s great to be back.  And it’s great to know the church we started is continuing to proclaim an Everybody’s In, Nobody’s Out Gospel. The City of St. Francis needs you to proclaim and embody this far and wide.    Amen. 

1. For more on this, see a previous Substack post of mine: https://fredharrell.substack.com/p/is-it-ok-to-change-your-mind

2.  Parker J. Palmer. Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation