Today we’d like to introduce you to Molly.
Hi Molly, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I come from a family of coaches, educators, and farmers in Central Illinois. Growing up I loved playing “school” with my dolls and brothers and anyone else I could convince to participate. My undergrad is in English Language Learners (ELL) Education. I studied Spanish and Latin American History in Costa Rica, Cuba, and Nicaragua, which was a life-changing experience that taught me how to be on my own, how to depend on strangers, and it revealed things about my own country that I thought was perfect. I taught ELL and coached volleyball for a little while here in Knoxville, until the strange church plant I found in college invited me to come on staff part time, which eventually became full time. At one point I tried getting out of local-church-ministry by going to seminary. Weird choice, I know, but I never intended to work for a church or go into ministry of any sort, and I definitely never intended to lead the place.
Along the way I realized what Crossings was doing in Knoxville was important, and I sensed my being at Crossings was important so I stuck around. In 2018, as I was tandem nursing twin infants, my husband and I decided it would be a good time to buy an abandoned lot in our neighborhood and launch a community space and neighborhood garden. Our faith community is pretty serious about listening to our neighbors, and the desire for passive green space and a garden is something we kept hearing. This isn’t a “tool for evangelism” or anything like that, most people at the garden don’t even know about Crossings. It truly is just a space for our neighbors to work together to grow food and relationships. In 2020, the garden received a Keep Knoxville Beautiful Orchid Award for “Community Space,” which felt really important to us in a COVID year when community was hard to come by.
In the depths of COVID the founder of Crossings stepped away for a new job opportunity, and I put my name in the hat for the Lead Pastor position because it sounded like a neat adventure, but mostly I felt protective over our little community and didn’t want anyone else to do it. So, I’ve been on staff at Crossings for fifteen years and Lead Pastor for the last five years. It’s a weird job that has changed me in a variety of ways, but it regularly feels like an honor to do.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
For a lot of people, faith is a source of stability. It’s the anchor in a hope that there’s something deeper going on around us and we can root ourselves in a story of a God who is restoring all things. Unfortunately, many folks feel like they have to remove themselves from the faith community to either 1) heal from what happened to them at previous faith communities or 2) they want to do something about the world’s condition and no longer want to identify with ways “popular Christianity” and politicians misrepresent the ways of Jesus. These folks don’t necessarily want to abandon their faith tradition, but they’re finding it increasingly harder to stay. The folks in my faith community feel that too.
I wish I could say it’s a struggle to be in the Bible Belt as a female pastor who has tattoos and drinks beer, but honestly people have been pretty great about it.
Also being a full-time working mom is no joke.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Crossings ?
Crossings is an interesting place. We meet a lot of people who tell us this is their last stop out of the faith thing altogether, or the only place they feel comfortable exploring their spirituality again. Crossings’ name comes from a story in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 32) where a man named Jacob crosses a river and wrestles things out with God in the middle of the night. The point is, we all get to a place in life and faith when we have to cross our own rivers and wrestle through our big questions about life and faith and God. That wrestling/doubting is not a bad thing, it doesn’t mean we’re doing anything wrong, it’s actually a really important thing and a necessary step along the way. So we have a lot of doubts and a lot of questions, and we’re a community that leans into the idea that our questions are often more important than our answers.
Room for such theological diversity, of course, can be messy, so we are committed to creating a generous space where people feel safe to ask their big questions and wrestle through their own questions about life and faith and God. Crossings is full of therapists and educators and social workers and nurses and people who are deeply committed to being good neighbors. We don’t do a whole lot of “church programming” because we want our people to have the margin in their lives to seek out the shalom (peace) of God wherever they’re already living, working, and playing.
We know Crossings isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay. We have a sense of clarity that we are filling a gap for those on the margins of faith, or those who are sorting through the rubble of a faith that has come crashing down and are deciding what’s left worth keeping.
Right now, we gather on Sunday mornings in The Square Room, Downtown Knoxville, but we are looking toward a new and exciting season as we partner with River & Rail Theatre Company and move into the new arts and theatre space they are creating.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
When I was 10, my dad had a critical health situation with his heart and brain and stayed at Mayo Clinic for several months. Shortly after, his new mechanical heart valve was recalled (you know, toaster ovens and blenders get recalled). Obviously, this isn’t ideal but it meant my family got expense-paid trips to Rochester, MN every year in which we would stay at the Kalahari Resort & Water Park, Great Wolf Lodge, and all the coolest places along the drive to Mayo Clinic, places we would never have been able to afford otherwise. During my dad’s health crisis, it was our friends and family and faith community who wrapped their arms around us and supported us in so many ways. I suspect this has something to do with the work I find myself in today.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://crossingsknoxville.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/crossings
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1BMAESiujy/
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/show/5PYDQx4OMkZsqgvWs935pS?si=a82c4e18d9d541ee
