What can a writer learn from being part of a church?

Part 1 How the unreasonable people in my church (including me) helped me to be a better writer.

The church, like the world, contains a strange mix of people. Some of them are agreeable and some are not, some are damaged slightly, some carry their burdens for all to see. Each of us lives with and is ourselves one of these people, and the lessons we learn from our lives together as Christians are the lessons we can learn for our writing.

For the next three months, I’ll be exploring how our lives within the community of the church can inform us as writers. In the first of three blogs, I’ll be looking at what we can learn from being in relationship with other people in the church.

Though we are many…

I live in Cambridge. It’s a nice, middle-class liberal town. It’s full of civilised, liberal, EU-Remainer, people. The churches have a good complement of such people in them. Recently some of my Remainer brethren discovered I was not, like them, a Remainer. In fact, I want us to leave the EU, I’m a Brexiter (Brexiteer?). This has left some of my brothers and sisters confused, they thought I was, in this sense, one of them, a decent sort, they have had to fit this unexpected piece of information into their view of me.

I am absolutely sure that in other parts of the country, in other church communities, the opposite has happened. In a congregation with a lot of Brexiteers, a Remainer has broken cover. He or she is just as convicted as anyone else of their convictions, and their Remainer beliefs are as much of a surprise to their Brexit brothers and sisters as my Brexit tendencies might be to my Remainer friends.

To muddy the waters further, there are people I’ve known in church who I am sure, if they had been left to deal with a particular issue, would have dealt with it the wrong way. If something had required tact they’d have blundered straight in, if something had required direct truth, they’d have skirted around the issues. These people are equally sure, and with at least as much justification, that if I’d had to deal with the issue, I’d have made a mess of it as well.

So it goes with the body of Christ, imperfect sinners, all of us. What are we to do?

…we are one body

For a start, we are required to love our neighbour as ourselves. This challenge requires us to do some hard thinking and brave living. We can’t really check out of dealing with and bearing with each other. The differences of ideology and temperament amongst are part of the Divine challenge. God wants to stretch us, he wants ‘iron to sharpen iron’ through our interactions with each other, that’s community.

As we explore this issue we realise that loving our neighbour isn’t a single act that we can do and tick off the list. Rather, it’s an ongoing, dynamic process. It’s a part of our formation within the Kingdom of God.

So what can we learn from all of this as writers?

The good lessons of life are good lessons for the writer. We learn that there are different ways to live a life of integrity across the spectrum of beliefs and temperament. We begin to understand our community.

This gives us an invaluable lesson in creating characters for our stories. We learn how to create a wide range of characters with honesty and integrity. They will have a rich and authentic basis and will play their part in enhancing the quality of our stories.

Furthermore, if we have taken the injunction to love our neighbour seriously, we’ve learnt some serious things about how people interact with each other, this can inform the character interactions in our work.

Finally, by learning how to reconcile with others, sometimes through struggle, we learn how to present discord and reconciliation authentically in our work.

Andrew Chamberlain is a writer and creative writing tutor. He is the presenter of The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt podcast and author of The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt Handbook containing the best advice and insight from 100 episodes of the podcast, and which was published in October 2017.