By now, if you’ve been reading my January Sunday blogs, you know how much I love my eccentric little Presbyterian Church in Seattle, where I am the pastor.

In my last blog I described the shock to the church when several large Burundian refugee families began attending. Especially in the first ten years of my ministry among them, pastoring this beloved “motley crew” meant trying to help mold them into a beautiful mosaic. Along with lots of prayer and consulting, a much-needed sabbatical gave me time apart to reflect and prepare for the task at hand. 

The theme I explored along the way was “the church as mosaic.” Already suspecting that this metaphor would not hold, I set off first to practice mosaic-making in Ravenna, Italy, the “City of Mosaic.” I enrolled in an intensive mosaic-making workshop and learned the ancient “Ravenna Technique.”

From day one, it was clear to me that mosaics are more predictable than people are. When I placed the tesserae into the mosaic, they stayed there. Especially after the mortar dried, a mosaic is in place forever; it is truly “set in stone.” This, obviously, is not a feature of a healthy living organism like a church.

But on we went, to visit and learn as much as we could about the context from which our Burundian members had come: Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania. Before we left, we tried our best to understand the journey our members had taken as they fled genocide. We heard their stories and wrote down as many village and refugee camp names as possible. We got names and phone numbers of their loved ones left behind.

Our first stop was Rwanda—one of the most dramatically beautiful countries in the world: lush, gorgeous tropical vegetation on steep, pointed green hills, with terraced growing spaces from top to bottom. Rwanda has made great strides since the hellish days of the 1994 genocide. They now live at peace. However, the atrocities of the genocide are never far from sight. So many people now live with limbs missing, a nose missing, or visible scars. I saw one man with the lower half of all of his arms and legs chopped off, then another, and another. This was common in the genocide, although most people left in this condition either died or were finished off later. 

We searched for the refugee camps our members had lived in, and discovered they had all been destroyed when the Burundian refugees were sent away. We did get to visit a camp that housed about 6000 Congolese refugees. 

Our driver, Dennis, aged 31, informed us that he was thirteen at the time of the genocide and lost all of his family except three younger siblings, who were sheltered with him in the hotel Milles des Collines of the movie “Hotel Rwanda” fame. When he discovered we were interested in learning more, he not only told us his story but also invited us to a commemoration at the Milles des Collines for survivors and for the people who helped them in the hotel. At the somber, candle-lit commemoration, a woman sidled up to us and quietly translated everything for us into English. In fact, this happened wherever we went–people went out of their to translate, direct, and help us. 

In Burundi, we were able to track down several close relatives of our church members. They were overjoyed to receive recent pictures of their loved ones, and we took pictures of them to bring back to Seattle. I will never forget sitting in the dirt-floor hut of the impossibly-thin elderly parents of one of our members. They had nothing but a broom, two tiny chairs, and sleeping pad, and a few cooking utensils. Although they probably hadn’t had anything to eat that day, they presented us with a raw, cut-up manioc root on a small plastic plate.

I returned to my Seattle congregation and shared that our congregation is not a typical mosaic. A mosaic is about as inflexible as anything that exists. But in order to be the living, breathing, growing, organism we are, we need to be in constant motion. As each new person enters the community, others need to shift in order to make room for that one. The whole mosaic changes each time a newcomer’s gifts are incorporated. Maybe we could begin to think of ourselves as a constantly morphing mosaic.

As I told stories of what we had seen and learned, showing pictures and playing bits of recorded singing from Rwandan and Burundian worship services, I was able to help church members understand each other better.

In time, we did become more flexible. We did learn what it means to be able to move aside so someone else can move in. We learned to look for the gifts God is bringing us through each new arrival. Today we are more joyful and more resilient. Though many of the children of our refugee families have grown up, gotten jobs, and moved away, they will always have a place of honor in the story of Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church.