Welcome to #ATLT, At the Lord’s Table: A Conversation, a series of over 50 posts from varying authors about the beautiful, mangled Church. Look for at least two new posts every Monday through Saturday between January 25th and February 22nd. Join us in the conversation? See you in the comments.
Church. For thirty-five years, I think of buildings when I hear the word. I think of white steeples, stiff formality and equally stiff pews, cerebral one-way lectures, that distinctive old-building smell, organ music, neck ties, panty hose, and patent leather. On a rare day, I also think of crisp sunrise services in a park at the foot of the mountains and the aroma of eggs scrambling on camp stoves mingling with perking coffee.
I hear through childhood that Church is people who love God and function in a harmony that mirrors a body, The Body of Jesus Christ. My parents remind me over and over that “Church” is not the building we spend our Sunday mornings inside. It doesn’t matter. I can’t stop associating the place with the word. I can’t wrap my head and heart around the expansive worldwide beautiful people-ness that is Church.
We sweat and bleed through five years in ministry, and church grows heavy with the burdens of expectations, services, and programs. My thoughts of church always drag with them a most unwelcome panic and images of Excel spreadsheets, music and nursery schedules, orders of service, and rehearsals. If I have a minute to pause and think, I wonder, “Where is love and God and grace?
We leave emaciated and wounded, starving for the simple words of Jesus – “wherever two or more of you are gathered in My name, there I am in your midst.”
Almost imperceptibly, the fog lifts. I realize that I am finally seeing where I’ve been this whole disorienting time. Church, the true Church, surrounds and loves and carries us, and has done so for years. Only I didn’t recognize it for it was.
I finally see it. Church can be gathering together on a Sunday morning, certainly. But it is far more than that. Church is every day, everywhere, all the time.
It is bringing meals to the family whose mom is wracked by the chemo dripping into her veins and by the cancer that chemo is chasing.
It is sharing God’s stories of hope in our lives on the drive from the hibachi restaurant to the conference hotel.
It is laughing til our jaws ache as we exchange secrets about happy marriage.
It is crying in the prayer circle, arms around the heart-broken, sopping up the grief of living in a broken world into a sweater sleeve.
It is playing games with the dirty abandoned children of a forgotten community in the hills of the second poorest country in South America and discovering that competition, laughter, and hugs transcend language, culture, and age.
It is spending every Friday night at a friend’s house, feeding her sick baby while the first-time mother sleeps, gifting her with one uninterrupted night a week.
It is bringing cookies to the surgical waiting room and sitting for hours while surgeons cut and sew and parents wait to hear whether their baby’s heart will beat again when it’s time.
It’s a text message sent at 3am saying, “I can’t sleep, so I’m praying for you right now.”
It’s listening to the prompt of the Holy Spirit to pray or call or email or visit a specific friend, instead of ignoring it.
It is allowing someone to help by folding your laundry (including your underwear), washing your dishes (even if they put them away in the wrong place), mowing your grass, vacuuming the carpets, and scrubbing your bathrooms, because they know you are overwhelmed by the circumstances you are facing and this is the only way they can find to alleviate a shred of the burden you carry.
It’s visiting other Christians somewhere else and singing together of your shared love of Jesus and tasting the joy of the worldwide Church united in worship of God and imagining that day when believers from all time and all places will sing together before God.
It’s talking with a friend over a word you used and how they understood it differently than you meant it and how it caused them concern and they cared enough to ask you about it and try to understand.
This is the Church. God’s people. Everywhere. Every day. And I finally see it – she is beautiful.
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read the post before this one, here.
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Joy Bennett
I am a writer, thinker, asker of questions, mother, wife, special needs mom, and bereaved parent. I love Jesus, and I’m very much still in process. I’ve been blogging since 2005, writing on faith and doubt, family life (which is often humorous even with the medical spin), grief, and the depression that I only recognized a year after our daughter died at the age of 8. Views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of me yesterday (or my church). Joy blogs here and tweets here.
© 2012, Preston. All rights reserved.
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