Faith in our community is key to consensus | Interfaith Column

I have the good fortune of being one of the ministers of Bainbridge Island’s oldest church, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church (United Church of Christ). Our congregation has put a great deal of energy (and money!) into being good stewards of our historic building.

Beyond taking care of the building our forebears erected in 1896, we also aspire to be good stewards of the less tangible legacy of our founders.

I wish I could have met Riley Hoskinson and Ambrose Grow. The Hoskinson family was among the first immigrant families to homestead on Bainbridge, after the initial set of loggers had come and gone.

Riley wrote a newspaper article extolling the virtues of the island, which drew Ambrose and Amanda Grow to sell their Kansas farm and move here to homestead the acreage neighboring the Hoskinson farm.

Riley and Ambrose made good neighbors. They enjoyed debating theological and political issues. I can picture them in their dusty farmer pants, leaning over a fence and hotly thrashing out a difference of opinion over some current event. In their day, their publicly published political and philosophical disagreements sold a lot of newspapers.

Yet when it came to the good of the community they were building, they put aside differences and worked together.

Grow donated the land where Eagle Harbor Church is built, and Hoskinson helped fund the building materials. They gathered 12 other family members and neighbors together to charter the church, which, from the very beginning, was a community center.

In our denomination, one of the truths we live by is that we seek to be united, not unanimous. Like our founders, we agree to disagree about some matters of theology, philosophy and politics but be held together in the faith community.

Love for God, love for each other and a strong commitment to the health of the community inside and outside the walls of the church binds us as one body.

What binds us together as a community? There must be more than geography that makes a community. It is pretty clear that our citizens lack unanimity on any topic; we hold a diversity of opinions on every issue.

I wonder if it is possible for us to be united even though we are not unanimous. Are there ideals around which we may be united? How might we describe the center that holds us together?

We are not the homesteaders our forebears were. We are, however, engaged in a similar task, trying to create the best community we can out of this jewel of an island. Grow and Hoskinson worked around the stumps left by loggers to do their farming.

We work around the environment we’ve inherited and the traditions and practices of some 150 years of local history. We’re all trying to grow and prosper; but personal gain is inadequate as a central ideal that can unite a community.

Perhaps plain neighborliness is a principle that can draw us together. In our Christian tradition, Jesus named as the most important commandments loving God with one’s whole heart, mind, strength and soul; and loving one’s neighbor as one loves oneself.

Simply considering the needs and desires of our neighbors as well as our own needs and desires would go a long way toward creating harmony among us.

What if we had some kind of consensus around the notion that the needs of our neighbors were as important as our own?

We might disagree with our neighbors about any number of things, but in the end we deeply value them as neighbors, and we put aside our differences long enough to offer our gifts for the greater good.

We are creating a home here, as surely as our ancestors were. In the unforgettable words of Mr. Rogers, let me pose the question: “Please, won’t you be my neighbor?”

Dee Eisenhauer is a pastor for Eagle Harbor Congregational Church