Community of Faith: New Places

This is an excerpt from some writing I did awhile back. I hope it leads you to think about your relationship with the church. When has the church been a "new place" for you? 

New Places

  I grew up on a farm in the middle of the northern Indiana. Many days were spent talking to livestock and jumping out of hay mounds with my three siblings. So, when I moved from rural community to rural community in the early days of adulthood, I did not feel like a fish out of water. The cornfields as far as the eye could see, the woods lining the back of our property, and the miles to the nearest grocery story all felt familiar and welcoming. I knew this terrain and loved the sound of cicadas and crickets in those early fall nights. 

I had also grown up as Old Blood in my town. The family joke was that my dad had to leave our small town to get a wife…because he was related to all the girls here. The third of four kids in a small rural school, the teachers loved me at the first glance of my last name. I was someone without even trying. This was not true in these new little towns I found myself moving to. I was a new person. They were the old blood and the familiar names and none of them had need for another friend. 

This was the reality that hit me hard when I took my toddlers to playgrounds or came to school sporting events. No one needed to bother with another person. I lived here, but I was not part of their community. Nor would I be. Each time I reached out, I was ignored or worse treated as a weirdo. Strangers don’t talk to each other in these places. 

This is the reality that hits many of us as we come to new places. We come as people whom the community doesn’t really care to include. The smaller the community the harder it is to break into. Indeed, some people who even marry into the local famous names, still never feel like they belong in these places. Forty years. Fifty years. This is not their place. They are only visitors. 

But not in God’s community. God’s church makes a place for new people. 

In fact, the Bible teaches that welcoming strangers is as old as Genesis. From travelers on Abraham’s doorstep all the way to Paul in Rome at the end of the New Testament. The church is a place for people without a place. Bible heroes are often heroes not for their capacity to love those in their city, but for their choice to love the travelers: Abraham, Lot, Rebekah, Rahab, the Woman at the well, the Disciples on the road to Emmaus, and Lydia. 

Each week the church lives into this with her welcome to strangers at her door. She welcomes in people without a community and gives them a place. She introduces new friends to old. She invites strangers into her community and then makes a way for these people in the larger community. She encourages residents to welcome newcomers.

Can the church survive seperation?

The news hit hard in this third week of social distancing of churches who are refusing to to suspend in person worship services, risking the lives of their congregation and the people the congregation comes in contact with. Not only is this dangerous, it also is bad theology.

For starters, the claim that God will "protect" his people in the sanctuary turns a virus into more than what it is. A virus is part of the natural order of the world, part of life itself. God allows viruses into our church buildings as much as he allows gravity, or the stray bird or bat. Viruses are not evil, they are nature. God doesn't curse people with illness, but he allows natural processes to happen.

While we are at it, lets talk about the sanctuary. The church building is not exempt from evil. It is a place we are intentional about meeting God, but God is intentional about meeting us every place we go. The sanctuary is not made holy by God's presence, its made holy by the searching for God that led us into it. No building is exempt from the worst of the world. In church buildings bombs and fires, gunshots and heart attacks have all occurred. A building does not protect you.

But we believe that the church is not a building, it is God's people. Can God's people still be together even if they can't touch each other? Our church is. People are calling each other, writing to each other, praying together, connecting together on Facebook not just one day but everyday of the week. We haven't stopped connecting because we can't come together physically on Sunday.

Now, lets talk faith. While those continuing to the meet claim they do so in faith, I argue that they are meeting because of a lack of faith. They are afraid that if they don't meet the church will not survive. I imagine that is what the early Christians thought when the Temple fell in their early days. But, she made it. And where ever Christians went, no matter how far from the building they were, God went with them. That's how the church grew.

It's much harder to have faith that the church will make it even if we are not meeting in the building, because we have to have faith in each other. We have to believe that when this is all over we will come back together to worship again. In my experience, it is much easier to trust God than to trust people. People have disappointed me more. But right now, we have to. We have to have faith in each other. We have to trust that we will not be forgotten. We have to do the work that has become harder: being the church even without a building. That is hard.

But maybe having a fast from our building, will help us remember what the church is. As the song says:

The church is not a building.The church is not a steeple.
The church is not a resting place. The church is People.
I am the church . You are the church. We are the church together.

Maybe God is teaching us how to be a more authentic faithful church.