Zina and Friends
When the Rev. Zina Jacque arrived four years ago to lead the Community Church of Barrington and its flock of 75, there was no way to guess how it would work.
She was the first black female to lead the town’s oldest church, and she was a spiritual whirlwind. But they chose her because they are “the church with open arms,” and she chose them because her spiritual capacity seems immense. What they did not know is that they would become each other’s best friends.
The people who worship inside the little brick church four blocks south of Barrington’s center possess a clear sense of themselves. Tradition will do that to a small but resilient group. Generations of the same families who have worshiped in the little church stretch back to a year that no one can quite comprehend.
The year 1847 is so long ago that it’s mostly just a numeric abstraction now. the early parishioners came to the little church to practice the original, old-time religion of Baptist founder Roger Williams. He preached tolerance, understanding, hope, human conscience and the primacy of the Bible. He preached the need to keep religion and civic life together. That last tenet got him banished from Massachusetts and tried for “sedition and heresy” by Puritan courts. So he left, and invented Rhode Island and told all the other unwanted, open-minded heretics to come with him. And they did.
Community Church’s founding came 14 years before the Civil War started when almost no one had heard of Abraham Lincoln. It was the year before a dark-haired young man named Wyatt Earp was born in downstate Monmouth.
George Armstrong Custer was only eight that year, and Sioux Chief Crazy Horse had just been born that February. Every adult present at the launch of the little church had been alive when Thomas Jefferson died 21 years earlier. There wasn’t even a village of Barrington when the church sprang forth. There was a Chicago, but not much of one.
But to understand the Barrington of now, you have to understand the Community Church of Barrington. If the finer instincts, traditions and temperaments of a community begin anywhere, they are likely to have begun in the pews of a little church. In fact, more precisely, this little church.
But the spirit that lives inside the little church at the corner of Lincoln and Grove is very much like the larger community. It wants to do right. It wants what’s best. It believes in justice and openness. There is no anger here. Only hope. Strangers say hello to you on the streets of Barrington for no particular reason. Once you understand the Community Church, you will have a head start on understanding Barrington.
Before you meet the little church and its people, meet the leader of the band.
On the road to a different life
Zina Jacque was alone with her thoughts, skimming at an unobtrusive 75 miles per hour or so on California’s U.S. 780. Oakland disappeared from the rear view mirror and Sacramento was up ahead 80 miles. It was her road to work and then home. No big deal. Except this day in 1993 would be the biggest deal of her life.
And then there was the voice. Those who do not believe in God would attribute the moment to day dreaming. Or the background noise your consciousness creates when it idles under the surface.
No, she says, it was God. “It WAS God,” she says directly without a hint of hyperbole.
When God spoke to Zina Jacque that afternoon on a California highway 17 years ago, it was a quiet conversation. She was not doing much of the talking, as she recalls. Jacque’s God is a quiet God, a gentle God that does not yell or threaten. He is good at nudges. And the gentle God nudged her. And she was listening because, after a full career in higher education that had not given her the fulfillment she had sought, she was ready to hear the whisper that questioned her life and what that life had meant to her.
And, at last, the whisper said to Zina Jacque, “Aren’t you tired of
running yet?”
When you look into Zina’s deep expressive eyes these years later, you know what her answer would be.
Yes, she told God that day, I am tired of running.
A woman and church of substance
All churches, all denominations have personalities. Churches, after all, aren’t piles of neatly stacked bricks. They are the sum total of the people who worship together inside the stack of bricks. Churches are the history of who they were, what they are and what they hope to be. They are alive in a nearly biological way.
Most have a role in their communities based on that personality. It’s a long-brewed mixture of ecclesiastical style and human preference. If schools teach their students in a certain way long enough and well enough, the community surrounding that school begins to take on the same characteristics.
And Community Church? “Generosity is the thing that marks this church,” Pastor Jacque says without a second’s thought. “As an example, few churches tithe. But we send away 10 percent of what we get every year and seek to give it in a way that doesn’t benefit us at all. We’ve settled refugees and supported men and women in difficult circumstances. This church just has a generous spirit.”
10,000 cookies
You see a kitchen and cooking utensils even before you come upon the main prayer assembly hall. That’s not a coincidence. Everywhere there are signs that say, “Welcome.”
“Every year at Christmas – the second Saturday in December - the women of the congregation bake 10,000 cookies,” she adds. “The cookies are all in one room. You come in with a plastic glove and a box. Then you fill up your box. About 300 boxes are sold for $10 each. Then the $3,000 is sent off to help somewhere. Maybe a missionary school in Kenya. We’ve been doing that for 30 years.”
But on any day for any reason that you might stop by, they’ll likely ask you to have a seat, relax a moment, have chat and, by the way, would you like something to eat? Soup? We’ve got plenty. And then they’ll ask you to come back soon.
After she told her husband, Andre Bell, and her pastor in Oakland about the chat on Highway 780, it took barely a year before she was enrolled in Boston University’s School of Theology.
She always had been an intellectual dynamo – not that she particularly courts the description – and she wielded a powerful stage presence as a budding minister. “I’m gonna go all Baptist on you,” she once warned an audience before launching her sermon. Within three years she had a theological doctorate, broad experience in Boston churches and was a luminary in the American Baptist universe. She was a sought-after voice from the pulpit. Though she can be serene and measured on the pulpit, she has a righteous fire barely hidden from view.
“I have said from the pulpit that if I never anger you or cause you to walk out saying you disagree with me, then something’s wrong,” she says. “I grew up with a pastor who said ‘if I never step on your toes, then you need to find another place to buy your shoes.’ This has got to be a place that makes you jump once in a while. Otherwise, you’re not growing.”
Also, this is not a job. It’s her life. And there is little use in Zina Jacque trying to be someone she’s not.
Twenty years as an academic in youth counseling and college administration from coast to coast had taught her politics and human motivation. Her upbringing had given her inner steel. Then 50 with a loving husband, two grown children and a doting grand-son, she was about to launch the most meaningful experiment of her life.
She was getting her own church, her own flock. She was going to need friends. Lots of friends.
Common ground in diverse times
The timing of her ministry coincided with an unfortunate turn in American religion. As denominations, sub-denominations, and unaffiliated churches sprang up on every vacant lot, older hometown churches fell under a competitive burden that they had never felt. Every year there were more churches seeking ever fewer members. And every year for 40 years, the numbers at Community dwindled; the ability to make a difference suffered. The church that had molded the town’s leading families for a century was suffering.
“Yes, things have changed,” said the Rev. Robert Reekie, a South African émigré who studied theology in Chicago who came to Community as a young minister to help out. He married his new-found sweetheart, Peggy. That was April 26, 1969, in the little church at Lincoln and Grove. “Churches everywhere have struggled, and so have we.”
As Peggy Reekie notes, the passing of years and the passing of old friends adds an uncharacteristic melancholy to Sunday morning. But she keeps it to herself.
For the first 82 years of Community Church’s existence, there had been only two competing churches in Barrington. Now there were dozens. And more every year.
Pastor Jacque encountered a pastoral community that remained vibrant spiritually but diminished in numbers. The goal, then, was obvious. “What we all hope for is for more people in the pews and especially more young people, more families with young children,” says Peggy Reekie.
Then Jacque took an amazing 90-degree turn toward a different light down a different tunnel. Along with Rev. Tom Burns (Open Door Fellowship) and Rev. Mary Tudela (St. Michael’s Episcopal Church), she helped organize a pair of intense retreats for the local ministerial association that sought to answer once and for all: Are we competitors for human resources or are we all working for the same God?
Over the course of 10 hours of prayer, reflection, arguing, and old-fashioned dickering, the ministers decided. “We decided we were going to live unto Christ’s calling,” says Jacque. “We decided we are as one. That we are in the same business.”
The working result of the first discernible alliance in the Barrington Area Ministerial Association is that ministers will send congregant candidates to other local churches when it seems useful. Some people fit better in different pews. “We decided that anyone who attends one of our churches has a better chance of knowing God,” she says. “Somehow there has been a graceful space, a grace-filled space created for the common good.”
Jacque and the Rev. Jeanne Hanson of St. Paul United Church of Christ are the co-presidents of the association, giving the group its most diverse public face ever. Even peace treaties among new-found friends can use vigilant sentries.
One among many
Of the hundred or so most recognized Christian denominations, a few are judgmental. Some are loud. Some are based in muted grays and browns. Others are as brash as a Miami Beach lime green cabana. There is the angry church. Some demand obedience to irrefutable dogma; others rely on the bond of fellowship. There are those that don’t seem eager to distinguish themselves from the others at all, and are the product of some long ago angry schism that no one can quite recall. Some blend in; others expect to lead because they are large and rich.
The Community Church of Barrington opens its arms and its affection for people – all kinds of people who believe all kinds of things – and seems unambiguously generous. Always has and, as far as its member believe, always will. There is an affable sweetness to it that belies the deep spirituality of its heart. You can’t fake happiness for very long. It’s a draining position if your soul isn’t in it.
There is a broad, palpable sense of friendship here. Old friends. New friends. Friends waiting to happen.
Thus, Community Church is a resiliently, resolutely positive place where the airs of major chord choral music swirl through the wooden rafters of its delicate little chapel. Two hundred or so can pray together there if they squeeze in tightly, and the number seems about right.
It’s an America Baptist church, but it’s not the variety of Baptist that draws the most attention. People at Community Church smile a lot because, well, it’s what they feel like doing.
When Pastor Jacque conducted her “Friend’s” event in September, it was more than a clever marketing outreach to other faiths and other flocks. There were bright balloons, free hot dogs, live music. The sun was welcomed because autumn’s chill whispered through the old trees that line Lincoln Street. It was a gentle hello to friends, many of them young.
The congregation swarmed about Jacque to seek her advice and her comfort and there was a natural dynamic at work. Zina Jacque doesn’t have to work at being important to this congregation. At last, at long last, she seems to have found where she belongs and found those to whom she best belongs. There are children and young families and many visitors who have come just to enjoy the moment. Her niece snuggles under her arm.
Zina Jacque knows what sort of place Barrington is and why she fits here.
“This is a church that’s got your back,” she says.
Ted Newman, a member for 40 years, has seen that. He and his wife raised three children in the church. He got married there. His daughter was just married there, too.
“It’s clearly a real small church, and it brings intimacy that people find nourishing,” he says. “That’s not to say a big church can’t do that, but I’m drawn to the fact it has a familial quality to it. People from all walks of life, at all stages of their spiritual life come here. They just ask that you bring who you are just as you are. If you want to grow spiritually and to explore spiritual questions, you can find that. If you want to find support for meaningful work in the world or community, you can get that here, too.”
Special days ahead
As they are every year, these are special days at the little church. The days before Christmas make the church purr. The families gather to “bring the green” and festoon the church. And food, always lots of food. As the children dream of Christmas, Pastor Zina holds her flock a little closer against the cold and reminds herself of the power of dreams.
“What’s that thing you dream?” she once asked of fellow ministers in a full voice, rising passionately higher. “Bring all of your dreams to Jesus! Do you think God’s so frail he can’t understand your dreams? Have a dream! Have to press through the mess. Got to press, my sister. God doesn’t need your permission or mine.”
All of Zina Jacque’s efforts may succeed. More people at Sunday service would be nice. Yes, more would be very nice. Nothing wrong with ambition, and she is generator of her own thermal energy.
But it’s not so much about the number of bodies in the little church on Sunday morning. Faith isn’t a wholesale business. It’s all done one at a time.
Zina Jacque came to the church four years ago. They picked her. She said yes. What Zina Jacque mostly dreams of is that someday a confused, disheartened visitor sitting in the very back of her church will quiet themselves and listen to a voice they have not heard in far too many years.
And the low, gentle, loving voice will ask, “Aren’t you tired of running yet?”
And the confused, disheartened soul will answer, “Yes, I am tired of running.”
David Rutter is the former senior editor at five newspapers, including the Lake County News-Sun. He is the editorial director at Quintessential Media Group.