Scum of the Earth

Some time ago I found myself in Denver for a conference. Knowing absolutely nobody, I set myself down in an open chair at a session, next to this guy who was decked out to the nines in punk uniform. Leather, studs, chains, tattoos, piercings, hair dye, mohawk—he jangled whenever he shifted in his seat. And then the speaker had us pair off for further discussion.

I forget his name, but I remember how mature he was, how focused he was on loving God and loving his neighbor as himself. I remember how much concern he showed for people who had been misplaced and misunderstood by the church of their youth, and whose rejection of and by the church hadn’t settled the questions of who God is and what God requires of us for them. And I remember that he called his church Scum of the Earth. He had a sticker for it and everything.

There are, I think, three intangibles at the heart of every initiative that has the moxie to invoke the name “church” for itself. And I think Scum models each of them in real and beautiful ways. First off, to be a church is to aspire to empathy. To commit yourself to getting to know the heart of a person you find yourself in an encounter with—that’s the heart of empathy, and it’s also a hard-fought discipline and a beautiful gift.

Scum came to be when a pastor opened himself to young people whose presence created tension in the church that hired him. Gradually a group of people gathered around that pastor and took their name from 1 Corinthians 4:13, permanently identifying themselves with the marginalized in their community and with a Messiah who came from the margins—who was born outside the inn and was executed outside the gates of the holy city. From the start, Scum of the Earth has sought to understand a God who sometimes seems far off, and people who sometimes seem intentionally shrouded in mystery. In that dogged determination, Scum shows us what it means to be a church.

Empathy is one basic element in a church’s identity; solidarity is another. Solidarity—a commitment to be for someone to the point where it costs us and changes us—shows up in the church from the beginning. Abraham prayed for the deliverance of a city he didn’t even like; Moses left the comfort of Egyptian royalty and even the privacy of a shepherd’s life to identify with and deliver Israel; Jesus took on flesh and dwelt among us and showed in the ultimate way that he is for us.

Scum has never been content to merely understand the people who call it their church. No, Scum reaches further, to show one another what it means to be for one another. From meals shared with the homeless community, to the fragile fellowship of punks and Goths, to the willingness to endure nationwide scrutiny in order for a young poet to give fully and authentically of herself to her God on the night before Christmas—in such persistent, resolute acts and expressions of solidarity, Scum shows us what it is to be a church.

I was delighted at my first visit to Scum’s website to see a list of small groups that included the “Army of Dorkness,” a Bible study that looked for points of connection between themes from the Scriptures and current plotlines in favorite comic books. That group and others at Scum like it echo the historic church’s acknowledgment that finite, fallen people cannot thrive in isolation. From its origins the church has explored what it means to live under God’s sovereignty together. In Christ we learn not so much that Jesus would have come and died for you even if you were the only person on earth—although that’s certainly implied in the gospel we have—but rather that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. We are all in this together, and the best churches recognize that and lean into it. And that’s what I see in Scum.

Empathy, solidarity, communal discovery—three aspects of what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ. They’re not all that’s involved in being the church; there are matters of core beliefs and questions of liturgy and public presence and all that. But they cut to the heart of what it means to be part of a community that has the moxie to consider itself sacred. Churches like Scum have truly gone all in, and are showing in rough and tumble ways how empathy, solidarity and communal discovery play out in real, everyday life. For those of us whose church experience is less dramatic and urgent than that of Scum, it can be mildly unsettling. But the genius of the church is that we are nevertheless part of one another, and we’re all in this together.