Attending Church

My wife and I are part of a small church (attendance was up yesterday, edging above 40 for the first time since Easter) that's been in our community since 1853, and to be honest, I wonder at times if it really makes a difference that I'm there at all (and I'm the preacher); but then I look around and remember why it's important that I'm there and that anyone else would be there too. There's a young man on one side holding a little girl who isn't his child, but she clings to him like they belong together. There's a man my age who was just released from jail, signaling me with a victory sign as he entered the sanctuary. There's an older woman who sees life differently since her stroke, waiting to hug me and give the same greeting from her sister she gives twice every Sunday morning. There's the older man who lost his wife a few years ago and finds his purpose in life these days by tending the climbing roses in the prayer garden. There's the sweet rancher in the choir who silently mourns the fact every Sunday that she can do everything with her weathered husband except attend church. There's the bent and largely hairless woman who has helped so many others through their times of crisis, but now wages her own battle against the onslaught of cancer. We are all different, but each Sunday morning is a kind of family reunion. 

The reason, I think, that so many find it hard to go to church is that we've largely lost the notion of what it means to be church.  We confuse participles for the noun. Singing, praying, dancing, preaching, teaching, these are all but modifiers of the real thing. I do enjoy pageantry. I'm a person of habit, so I like ritual in worship as well. Predictability need not stifle expression; it may, in fact, liberate it. I thrill to soul stirring music (unless we repeat the same lines more than seven times). Good Preaching has always moves me and bad preaching perturbs me (not to say I haven't done more than my fair share of it). But all these may be experienced alone and in private, particularly with the advent of wireless and television. What makes church "church" is that I am present with other pilgrims, connected spiritually as well as physically. It is the connection (relationship) that morphs worship into life transformation. Absence does not make the heart grow fonder; it cools the heart and dulls the spirit. This is not a new problem. One particular church in the New Testament was having a dickens of a time getting folks to show up, hence the admonition: "Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching" (Hebrews 10:25). Me loving you, and you loving me, liberates both of us to love God and worship him "in spirit and in truth."

All of this reminds me of something Frederick Buechner said during his  200th anniversary sermon at the Congregational church in Rupert, Vermont: "Despite the enormous differences between them, all these  men and women entered this building just the way you and I entered a few minutes ago because of one thing they had in common. What they had in common was that, like us, they believed (or sometimes believed and sometimes didn't believe; or wanted to believe; or liked to think they believed) that the universe, that everything there is, didn't come about by chance but was created by God. Like us they believed, on their best days anyway, that all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this God was a God like Jesus, which is to say a God of love. That, I think, is the crux of the matter. In 1786 and 1886 and 1986 and all the years between, that is the heart of what has made this place a church. This is what all the whooping has been about. In the beginning it was not some vast cosmic explosion that made the heavens and the earth. It was a loving God who did. This is our faith and the faith of all the ones who came before us" (Buechner, "The Clown in the Belfry").