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").

The Anonymous Church

I feel sorry for those believers who've never known anything other than the anonymous church. Sitting Sunday after Sunday in what amounts to the ecclesiastical equivalent of a concert hall, many tread spiritual water midst a sea of strangers--unknown quantities, mutual anonymity. These are they who look like you, right down to the plaid and khakis, but who remain to you a nameless entity. And you remain a cipher in the snow to them as well.  I mourn for you because you've attended "church" all your life, but have never known the pain of dealing with your own honesty while face to face with a group of people who know the truth but love you anyway. You've probably not encountered the rebuke of teaching on spirit fullness and then having someone ask, "Well, why then are you over weight?" You've likely never been held by a chain smoking homosexual who is in the process of coming to Christ, but not still there, and whose scent and searing pain lingers on your skin and in your heart. Odds are you have made it through your church career without wrestling with a church member 's addiction, someone you ordinarily would avoid, but, instead, gladly accept her call at midnight in order to go and retrieve her and get her safely to a shelter. 

I grieve for those who survive a lifetime of Sunday services and Wednesday night 'prayer meetings' without being more than stirred sporadically and never altered on account of another's narrative. The disciple's life is intended as dialogue, not monologue. Church should promote such stark reality among mutual pilgrims or it ceases to be "church" in the New Testament portrayal of the concept.

"Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world... Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community." (Bonhoeffer, Life Together)

Recovering

We're all recovering from something. That truth should be the great equalizer in any church, but, sadly, many church members go through their religious motions with a numbing strand of spiritual amnesia. Forgetting what it was like to be lost or impaired or in bondage to anything, we slip easily into the mode of both judge and jury. We carry out our sentences with a sideways glance, a subtle turning away, a dismissive word, a rumor started. How in God's name did His church ever become a place of judgment and condemnation when she was created to be the New Testament equivalent of the Old Testament's City of Refuge? Adults behaving badly, and all in the name of Christ. With each passing year, the less certain I become of the importance of much of the pageantry we produce and practice in the name of worship, and the more convinced I am of the necessity of grace as the ground of all true worship. Could there be any clearer celebration of the worth of God than to extend mercy to those who stand or bow or bend in His image, regardless of the beauty or lack there of in the narrative that is their life?

Prayerfully consider the following analogy by Frederick Buechner:

When they first start talking at a meeting, they introduce themselves by saying, “I am John. I am an alcoholic.” “I am Mary. I am an alcoholic,” to which the rest of the group answers each time in unison, “Hi, John,” “Hi, Mary.” They are apt to end with the Lord’s Prayer or the Serenity Prayer. Apart from that they have no ritual. They have no hierarchy. They have no dues or budget. They do not advertise or proselytize. Having no building of their own, they meet wherever they can.

Nobody lectures them, and they do not lecture each other. They simply tell their own stories with the candor that anonymity makes possible. They tell where they went wrong, and how, day by day they are trying to go right. They tell where they find the strength and understanding and hope to keep trying. Sometimes one of them will take special responsibility for another – to be available at any hour of day or night if need arises. There’s not much more to it than that, and it seems to be enough. Healing happens. Miracles are made.

You can’t help thinking that something like this is what the Church is meant to be and maybe once was before it got to be Big Business. Sinners Anonymous. “I can will what is right but I cannot do it,” is the way Saint Paul put it, speaking for all of us. “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19). (Listening to Your Life, 1972)

Defining Church

I'd like to offer my own definition of church. Yesterday, I wrote that the words 'mega church' are contradictory, and I believe that strongly. Since it is always easier to oppose an idea than to advance one, I might let it lie and wait for another opportunity to shoot from the hip or blast away at some prominent practice with which I disagree, but what good does that do anyone? In time I would resemble more the wicked witches of east and west than Glenda, the good witch of the north. So, here goes my attempt to be positive and proactive as it relates to ecclesiastical debates of the day. I offer the following: A church is a prophetic community of faith. Perhaps you were waiting for something more dramatic, but, actually, I believe that statement is grounds for quite a stirring. Here's what I mean. "Prophetic" means transformational. A church is to be a change agent, positively transforming its community and the members of that community. If something were to happen to remove all vestiges of your church from one day to the next, who would notice? What difference would it make?  If the answer is none, yours was never really church. The second word in the definition is "community."  That means that church is built on a foundation of trust and we only trust those we know. In other words, strangers may attend an event together and even sit next to one another, but relationship is required to be church. And, finally, "faith." The church must live out, moment by moment, a radical relationship with Jesus Christ.  We are defined by him more than we are by each other or by place, or even by effect. Now, here's the kicker-- all three elements must be active to be church. A failure at any point negates the whole. Notice that this understanding places no importance to size and gives no weight to demographics. What it does is stress emphatically that a church is to be transformed from the inside out by an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.

Knowing and Being Known

I reside as part of a small community and I'm a member of an even smaller community of faith. I live here because my wife lived here before me, and over the past eight years I've grown not only accustomed to these surroundings, but to care for the people who are fixtures in these surroundings. Two such residents who mean a great deal to me are our landlords and neighbors from down the simple country lane I now call home.  This relationship led last year to my agreeing to preach at their small historic church that stands near the geographical gateway to the modest region. The white clapboard church building wears the label 'Methodist,' but consists of parishioners who are primarily not Methodists -- a denominational Heinz 57.  So, in an oddly unpredictable way, I fit - in this church, in this community, in this home. I have been thinking lately that were you granted the opportunity like the one given Karen Blixen by Denys Finch Hatton in "Out of Africa" as he flies her in an open cockpit biplane over her beloved Ngong Hills, you would peer down over the side and notice a quilt-like pattern spread out below you, a fitting image for a quilting people. Like the land, we are pieced together here, somewhat akin to gingham patches in an antique quilt.  This is a locale where the cemetery reveals as much about the community as anything living. In the overall scheme of things, not many have lived and died here over the past one hundred and sixty years. A relatively few familiar family names are etched in stone, scattered throughout Bosqueville cemetery like a circling of the wagons, a community's last stand against the onslaught of life and death. In the end, Bosqueville cannot be understood by GPS coordinates or surveyor's stakes; it is defined by its residents. The community persists along family lines, where neighbors know one another, attend each other's funerals, and applaud one another's children at school celebrations and athletic contests.  This is not a place for strangers. It is a place for friends, a place for family, and, above all else, it is a place for being known.  I share all of this because I believe God intends his churches to be just that-- places for knowing and being known.  We were created for him and to live in relationship with him and each other. We are to be a community in the fullest sense of the word. As Frederick Buechner writes: "There is plenty of work to be done here, God knows. To struggle each day to walk paths of righteousness is no pushover, and struggle we must because just as we are fed like sheep in green pastures, we must also feed his sheep, which are each other. Jesus, our shepherd, tells us that. We must help bear each other's burdens. We must pray for each other. We must nourish each other, weep with each other, rejoice with each other. In short, we must love each other. We must never forget that."