Footwashing: one congregation’s story

Bridgefolk participant Pat Shaver from Seattle Mennonite Church offers these reflections on the challenges her congregation encountered while planning a footwashing service:

Hygiene and hospitality

Seattle Mennonite is an urban congregation with a growing homeless ministry. MRSA (virulent type of infection) is frequent among the homeless.  The congregation needed a way to protect the health of the participants while being open and welcoming.  To meet this challenge, the congregation provided an individual towel for each person and someone at each station to insure people used hand sanitizer after washing someone’s feet.

A local homeless chaplain said that to allow homeless persons to participate without feeling ashamed, the congregation should offer a foot clinic two weeks before a footwashing, as feet are often one of the most abused parts of the body when homeless.  People in wheelchairs who couldn’t easily remove their shoes and people with cuts on their feet who shouldn’t participate due to risk of infection were invited to participate in a handwashing station

In order to protect those who had suffered from sexual abuse, some stations were single-gender.  A total of five stations were available: one for handwashing, two single-gender and two mixed-gender. Participants chose their own station.

Congregational education

The majority of the congregation members were not raised in a Mennonite home, and so there was a challenge of educating the congregation about this practice.  Leaders decided to talk about the practice each Sunday for a month or so beforehand:

“naming the fear (sense of dis-ease, strangeness, emotional baggage from the way it was practiced growing up, the strange intimacy of feet), as well as the gifts (we experience God and the other in a visceral way that we will never know through thinking alone, the discomfort and gift of giving without getting something back from the same person [our process wasn’t reciprocal]. We promised folks that they could attend the service [in which we talked about the topic at greater length] and not participate – that their singing and holding the participants in prayer would be a great blessing.”

Children were invited to participate in a footwashing simulation during Children’s Time to demonstrate the practice to the congregation.  During the footwashing ritual, children observed from the balcony.

Reflections

“We gave people a chance to talk about experience afterwards, during adult study, which provided an opportunity for people who participated to share their experience and for those who didn’t participate to hear. Stories: of life-long embarrassment about one’s feet; of hearing one of the homeless men say, “this reminds me of when I was a medic in Vietnam;” of an adult son who was able to wash his mother’s feet, expressing his gratitude for the 4 months she had taken care of him through an illness; of the handwashing station reminding a gentleman of MCC in Indonesia, where the hospitality of tribal folks in the hill country included meeting one at the door with a vessel of water to wash the visitor’s hands.

“It was a rich experience AND 25% of the congregation did not come that day (remember, I’d given them plenty of notice). The biggest objection I heard was that it is an archaic ritual that doesn’t apply today. Obviously we have a lot to work on still.”