church 101

Last night was hard, hard work and strangely satisfying. We have been meeting for nearly two years initially trying to figure out how to stay in a church we had loved for many years. When that became impossible, our focus shifted and we began to meet for worship, house church. And now it is time to move on from that. Face to face, straight on, fears, hurts, anger, needy people that we are, last night church happened. We named the reality that has been staring us in the face. We are already church for one another. We don’t agree on everything. We are as different as night and day in theology, stages in life, worship needs, personality styles, life experiences and church history. But we are church for each other.
Now we have to figure out how to provide church friends for Hannah, a group for our teenagers, worship that meets our needs enough to keep us going, mission to the community outside our small group, a 501 3c, find a central place to meet, and a name for this great adventure. Music and laughter and love and being known, love for God which is usually easy, and the really hard work of loving the child of God sitting next to me who just ticked me off or who must be nuts to think that way, teaching our young, witnessing to the world beyond our small group, how crazy these followers of Jesus must be to think they can be a church. We are crazy in love with God and with each other. One of our group, a newer member, put it nicely. She said, “I come here to find God and to just hang out with you guys. I love you.” And like all crazy love, the ragged edges pinch like a pair of new stiff shoes.
We are a room full of Chiefs and few Indians. Each of us has baggage from other church experiences, fear and hope living side by side in our hearts. We know how very, very good real church can be and we also know how badly it can hurt, how hard it is to do the work of being church. But, we can’t help ourselves because our longing for being with God and with each other in a “real church” has brought us to this place. And somewhere deep down in my heart, I wonder if God knew this was coming.
I pray a lot for God’s pillar of fire to lead us through the murky stages of our shift in being. I pray for this little Family of God, all the aunts and uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers, who are bound together in the ties that bind... faith, hope and love. The greatest of these is love. Somehow we will figure the other stuff out, find a place to be, organize ourselves into a self-governing body of believers, tend to those among us who need the care of a pastor and reach out to others in need, teach our children (and ourselves) about the life and ways of Jesus, and lay our lives down for each other.
We meet again in two weeks on a Wednesday night ( Oh, Lord... bi-monthly business meetings!) to hear what possibilities for place our search team has found for us. We will decide where to go and then we will continue the work begun last night, creating a map for this road trip. Everybody has something they can do and everybody has something they want to do. So here we go, like Columbus, sailing off to the end of the earth as we have known it, saying our prayers and trusting in the Providence of God to provide for us what we need even when we cannot name what we need. “He loves us and delights in us, and so he wills us to love him and delight in him and trust mightily in him, and all shall be well... you will see it for yourself, that everything shall be well.” I am taking Julian of Norwich at her word, trusting everything shall be well.