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)

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."