The Salt To Stave Off Decline, Churches Attract New Members With Beer

'Then we were kind of laughing, and she goes, 'Oh, my gosh, I'm so glad you're my pastor, because I know you've done much worse than that.' So that's also a service I offer.' 'There was a young woman, I took her confession - and it was for real, it was something really heavy - and she was super tense at the beginning, and then she relaxed,' Bolz-Weber says. That checkered history is something she talks about openly, trying to help others feel comfortable with their own failings. Early in adulthood she drifted away from her parents' conservative Church of Christ and into a lost period of drugs and alcohol, only to find God again as she was struggling to get sober. 'I don't think the early Christians martyred themselves for either of these things.'īolz-Weber's path to becoming an increasingly public theologian was rocky, to say the least. 'We've been given social conventions, we've been given basically the Elks Club with Eucharist, or we've been given a place to gather on Sundays where basically what we hear is the same as the platform of the Democratic Party,' she says. What people want, she says, is a spiritual community that's beautiful and transformative and maybe even transgressive - and that's not what you find in most churches, conservative or liberal.

Jim Smelser/House for All Sinners and Saints Members of the church meet at Denver coffeehouses during the week for what they call 'office hours' - informal and often highly irreverent chats. Her new book, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, recently hit the New York Times best-seller list. Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber is a bit of a Lutheran rock star at the moment, although the term makes her cringe. 'In our win-lose way of understanding things, it would have made a lot more sense for Jesus to have come and been a superhero - kicking ass and taking names, showing everyone how strong God is by winning at our game,' she tells the congregation. But even in this crowd, the congregation's pastor, with her short, moussed hair and armloads of religious tattoos, stands out as she launches into a sermon about Jesus on the cross. The congregation here resembles the crowd at a downtown bookshop - hipsters and college professors, gay couples and Democratic grandmas. Together they follow traditional Christian rites. Nearly 200 worshipers sit in circles of plastic chairs around a simple altar table. It's Sunday evening, and services are just getting underway at the House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver. Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, shown here officiating civil union ceremonies in Denver in May, wrote a book on faith that recently landed on the New York Times best-seller list.

Sinners and Saints by Allie Bloom