The shelter, nurture and spiritual fellowship of the children of God

Tonight, we move on to the second great end of the church.
My technical support is questionable.
So we’ll get this back up here, but the shelter,
the nurture, and the spiritual fellowship
of the children of God,
which is a mouthful,
but in some ways is,
as a pastor,
I think perhaps my favorite of the ends because it is specifically inside the church.
The other five ends of the church are really about kind of doing something outside of us,
but this one is more about being something inside.
It’s essentially internal.
It’s less about what the church does,
and I think more about what the church is,
and the deep theme that runs through this end of the church,
this mission of the church, is community,
that combination of two words,
common unity.
So unity,
oneness among many.
It’s about how to be the church,
but it is as much about what the church is.
And I’m biased,
but I think the church is unique.
The church is unlike a lot of other voluntary groups.
The diversity inside the church,
even in a small church in northwest Iowa in a mainline denomination,
is amazing.
We have a wide range of people in just about any given congregation,
not as much perhaps
as we would like,
maybe not even as much as we should,
but it is here.
I got a call last week from an unhappy Methodist.
The Methodists had taken a denominational vote on something,
and they weren’t pleased with it,
so they called me and said,
“I’m not going to be Methodist anymore.
What do you think about this?
What does your church think of this?”
And I said, “Well,
it depends who you ask.”
I mean,
you could come in on any Sunday morning and talk to 10 people and get five different
answers, and along that spectrum,
you’d get way yes and way no,
and some in the middle,
and it is very hard in a Presbyterian church to talk about any kind of issue with uniformity.
Because we allow for differences of opinions,
and one of the strange realities of pastoring
is that you sometimes have a glimpse into that.
Sometimes I’m in a position to know some things about who it is that’s here on a Sunday morning.
So I can look out sometimes,
and on any given Sunday,
I can see people that I know are happy.
I know they’ve had a good week.
I know they’ve been worried about something,
but it’s gone well,
they’re pleased,
and right next to them,
maybe somebody who’s reeling from bad news,
who’s struggling with something.
Somebody on Sunday morning is celebrating a relationship,
and somebody is trying to
hold on to one.
Somebody shows up with kids that are doing great,
and somebody shows up with pain over
the struggles of their children.
Someone got better and is rejoicing.
Someone didn’t get better,
and their family is sitting in the pew grieving.
Snowbirds are returning from their vacations,
and in some cases, second houses,
and they’re sitting next to someone who’s hoping they can make rent.
And we have this virtually every week, and even here,
where there’s not a great deal
of racial diversity, and we’re more or less would find ourselves in what
passes for the middle class,
there are worlds of different experiences here each and every time that
we get together.
It may not always look like it to an outsider,
but if you know a little something about the
stories on the inside,
you understand that that’s true.
And I would make the case that very few places voluntarily bring together such a range of ages, races,
opinions,
experiences,
as does the church.
And our calling, somehow in that wideness,
is to find a common oneness
in Christ
and to be community,
which I think is why Eugene Peterson once said of the church,
“It is equal parts mystery and mess.” It
is our task to function as a family,
to be together as body,
and that’s not an easy one.
And tonight, as we go through this great end of the church,
we’re actually going to start at the end.
Before we get to the what,
we have to deal with the who.
The end of this great end says the children of God, the nurture,
the shelter, the spiritual fellowship of the children of God,
and that’s important because what it means is that this
task is bigger than a particular church,
bigger than a particular congregation.
What the church pursues is not simply for any one local extension of it or for any one
small portion of it,
but for all of it.
To be in Christ is to be connected with everyone else who is in Christ,
which is a massive
thing to think about.
A little over a decade ago,
I’m getting old enough where I get to talk about things in decades.
A decade ago,
I got asked to speak at Northwestern’s chapel.
I was an alumni,
and I assume something fell through,
and they called the Presbyterian.
They have yet to invite me back,
so I can’t say that it went well.
But as I prepared,
I thought, “You know,
what does a pastor of a church say to college
kids, even ‘Christian’ college kids?”
They pretty much heard it all.
And so the message I put together was essentially,
“Don’t give up on the church.”
Yes, we get it wrong a lot.
Yes, there’s hypocrisy and apathy and jealousy and judgment and a bunch of other stuff,
but when we get it right,
it is an amazing,
incredible place, and we need your help to get it right
more often and do that together.
And it went fine,
I think.
Like I said, I haven’t been invited back,
but it seemed like it went okay.
It was late in the year when all the kids at Northwestern,
you have to go to chapel
a certain amount of time.
So in the spring,
late in the semester,
everybody’s cramming the chapel to try and make sure
they make up their absences.
So what that means is you have a whole balcony full of people that are there because they
need to be, and most of them are asleep.
Also,
about two minutes before they introduced me,
and I had a kind of story to tell about
some pranks that were done while I was there that I was not a part of,
but witnessed.
And about five minutes before chapel started,
they let me know,
“Oh, by the way,
the board is here.
The board of Northwestern College is here.”
So then I had to tell them about what happened when they dedicated the chapel,
and people rolled marbles down the floor.
But the chaplain, after we got done,
he was thanking me, and he said,
“That was a good
word for these kids.
The heresy of our day is that you can have Christ without the church.
The heresy of our day is Christ without the church.
The idea that if I have Jesus,
I don’t need y’all.
I can do Jesus on my own.
Like a bumper sticker I saw once said,
‘I love the Lord,
it’s his followers, I can’t stand.’
It’s intriguing that the heresies of the past were the idea that you could have church without Christ.
But if he’s right,
our struggle is that we believe we can have Christ without the church.
I think of that sometimes I meet someone and they find out I’m a pastor,
and then they want to tell me what’s wrong with the church.
Oh, there’s people in the church,
there’s this, there’s that, there’s agendas.
Some of those people aren’t real Christians.
It’s too tolerant, it’s too intolerant, it’s too conservative, it’s too liberal, whatever.
And I just, I’m always tempted, I just want to say, “Dude,
I’m there every day.
You don’t know the half of it.
Whatever you think it is, it’s worse.
I promised you we are a mess.”
There’s a
bishop now, he used to be a seminary professor named Will Willimon,
and he said he’d talk to seminary students and he’d say,
“Why do you want to be a pastor?”
And they’d say, “I want to work with people.”
And he would ask them,
“Have you met these people?
Have you met us?
Have you been around us before?” Well,
and this is why it matters so much that in this great end of the church we are directed
not to our congregation,
but to the children of God.
Not
just our neighbors and our friends and our co-thinkers and people who agree with us,
but the children of God,
all of them.
The church exists for all of them.
To be in faith is to deal with Jesus,
and to deal with Jesus is to deal with the church,
which is his body.
Philip Yancey said Christianity can only be lived out in community,
and then he quotes
St.
John of the Cross,
“The virtuous soul alone is like the burning coal alone.
Both grow colder rather than warmer.”
True Christian community begins exactly at the place it makes us struggle,
where it takes love and grace and forgiveness and patience to deal with each other when it takes that
stuff that’s bigger than what we bring.
When we have to rely on Jesus to be community.
Jane and I took the girls to a concert Friday night over in Sioux Falls.
I met a friend there that I had been in college with,
happened to see he and his wife were at the concert,
and so I got a chance to talk with him.
I didn’t know the church we were in.
It was called Central Church,
big church, modern church.
He said, “I visited this church before.
It’s a good church.
They preach the word here.”
Which is a wonderful thing to say about a church.
What he means is it’s a good church,
and he experienced faithful people there.
But as I thought about it later,
I thought, “You know what?
That also implies is that I know the word when I hear it.
I know the word,
and I can go to a place,
and I can decide whether they preach it or
not.” They preach the word.
Which is okay, I guess, and there’s some truth to that.
But as I think about my own life,
it’s humbling how often I have heard God from people I didn’t agree with.
And if I stopped being right long enough to listen,
I would often learn something.
So the idea that to go to a place and rather than listen for the word,
decide whether it is the word, is a little bit worrisome.
And we do have to be careful that we don’t end up in a community of clones,
because that is not the Christian community.
One of the great professions of the Reformed tradition is that our faith is not simply personal.
It is communal.
It is connectional.
It’s not just me and Jesus.
It is Jesus and us.
And I think that is the heart of this great end, number two.
The children of God is the foundation for things like shelter and nurture and fellowship.
And when we understand that,
then we’re ready, I think, to go through the particulars.
Shelter,
we get,
it’s to provide for,
it’s to give relief,
it’s to help and protect,
to make room for and keep safe.
It’s respite for weary travelers,
burdens of people for whom life has been hard.
And we do this in a number of ways.
We do this when we pray for one another,
we do this when we stand with the vulnerable,
we do this when we practice hospitality,
when we welcome people,
when we feed people,
when we provide literal shelter in some cases,
and when we welcome people without restrictions.
It’s not to say that there are no restrictions in the faith,
but there really should be no
restrictions on who’s welcome in the church.
Who comes through the doors, at least.
Some of you have heard me tell this story.
When I was an associate pastor in Texas,
that church had a big pipe organ.
They had trumpet pipes and the big,
all the stuff.
It was a huge organ.
Some place in Canada made it and they would come and fix it.
They had these big trumpet pipes that went out from the front.
Well, when the first year they installed them,
which is before I got there,
it’s hot in Texas.
And I don’t know what they make organ pipes out of,
but it’s a soft metal.
And after the first summer,
all the organ pipes did this.
So when I got there,
they had rods on top of the organ pipes that kept them from drooping,
which seemed like bad planning,
but I’ve never built an organ,
so I don’t know.
But because they had a huge,
this huge pipe organ,
they had an organ recital.
Every year somebody had endowed an organ recital.
So one of the maybe not favorite parts of my annual job description was put on a suit and tie,
go sit for three hours and listen to pipe organ.
Although there were times it was really good.
But if you know me,
five minutes of classical organ music,
I’m good.
Three hours is a long time.
Well, one of the organ recitals,
I remember I was in the back,
and a couple of young ladies came in and they sat together,
and they were kind of down front.
And the organ council we had moved,
and so they would move it to the center of the chancel.
And the thing that was cool,
they turned it around so you were staring at the back of the organist,
which meant you could watch their hands and feet move around.
So for a guy with ADD at least gave you something to kind of.
But these two ladies sat pretty far down,
and so they were in the field of view for a lot of people watching the organist.
And they started off sitting together,
and then pretty soon one has her arm around the other one
in a way that could have just been stretching.
But then pretty soon it wasn’t just stretching.
They’re cuddling,
and it’s pretty clear that they came together.
I mean,
they’re a pair.
They’re a couple.
And that church was — so that’s a stretch for that congregation.
I mean, that’s not — a lot of people didn’t know what to do with that,
even though it was just an organ recital.
And that was a pretty hot topic of conversation that week.
Who were — and I don’t know if you’ve been in the South.
They have this wonderful way they try to work around things.
They’re not — I got accused of being blunt a lot there because instead of saying,
“Hey, who were the two girls that seemed together?”
They would say, “We had a good crowd at the organ recital.”
“Yeah, we did a lot of people there.” “Yeah,
some people I didn’t know.” “Oh, yeah.
Yeah, there were a couple of girls down front.
Did you happen to — did you know who they were?”
And I want to say,
“You mean the gay couple.”
And they say, you know, “No, no, no.
Oh, I don’t know.”
So that whole week,
people talked about this couple.
Interestingly,
though,
not one person knew either of their names.
So nobody engaged them.
Nobody welcomed them.
Nobody said,
“Hey, glad you’re here.
How are you?
I’m Clint.”
Including me.
I didn’t know their names.
We saw them.
In some cases, we judged them.
We knew about them,
but we didn’t welcome them.
And that kind of thing happens in the church.
That doesn’t happen here very often.
It has happened occasionally,
but not much.
We are to be a place where people are welcome.
Not because they fit our ideas,
but because God loves them.
And the rest, they can figure out with us once they get here.
But when they get here,
we are to welcome them with shelter.
I don’t know if it’s still a thing,
but I know that some of the stickers are still in windows.
If you’ve ever noticed,
in some of the houses around Spirit Lake,
there’s a sticker usually in the front window that says,
“Safe Place.” Have you seen these?
And it’s often a police officer or a doctor or an official of some kind.
And that tells a runaway or someone in trouble
that they can knock on the door of that house,
and there’s someone in that house who has an ability to help them,
who will help them get something that they need.
Well, that’s to be the church.
Shelter,
a safe place for people,
even if they’re people that might make us uncomfortable.
And that’s a challenge.
There’s a story about a lost girl.
She can’t find her way home.
She gets confused on her way home from someplace.
She’s walking.
A police officer comes by,
drives her around for a little bit.
They drive by a church,
and she says, “That’s my church.”
And then she tells the police officer,
“You can let me off here.
I can always find my way home from church.”
Well, that’s shelter, the place to recover,
to rest,
to find our way home.
That’s shelter.
Nurture, we also get to be cared for,
to be taught, to be strengthened.
We had a chance to be with Bailey a little bit this weekend.
Our oldest daughter, she’s working as a nurse in St.
Paul.
She’s at a recovery hospital where they kind of do respite care.
And so it was fun to talk to her about how she’s helping people recover.
It was also staggering for any parent,
I think, to think, “They’re letting you give people shots and medicine.”
And she said something about suppositories,
and Jane and I said,
“They do that themselves,
right?” And she said, “No, they don’t, Dad.”
Oh, my God, I cross nurse off my list.
Respite care,
nurture.
A church has a spiritual mission to help people while they recover.
It may be crisis,
it might be divorce,
it might be grief,
it might be something else,
it might be addiction.
But a place here to be nurtured,
a place to grow,
also a place to be challenged,
given opportunities, a place to think about the faith,
as we’re trying to do now,
to encounter ideas about God and truths about Christ.
This is the stuff we do all the time, Sunday school,
vacation Bible school, Bible studies,
sermons, prayer groups, recharge.
This is kind of our programming, opportunities,
hopefully, to grow in faith, mission trips,
the church has to do that.
But in order to do that,
we have to be together.
A wonderful verse in the book of Hebrews that says,
“Let us not neglect getting together,
as some have done,
but let us encourage one another,
and even more as you see the day approaching.”
It’s not just the church’s job to nurture people,
it’s our job collectively to nurture each other,
to help each other grow,
so that we can be a place where the children of God can rest and recover
and grow in their faith.
And finally then,
that being nurtured, we get fellowship.
Fellowship I think we get completely,
which is why it’s important that it doesn’t just say fellowship,
it says spiritual fellowship.
It is relationships,
but not just relationships.
Relationships tend to be based on commonality and common interests
and places of connection.
Christian relationships are based on Christ.
We are related to others who are Christian
simply because we all believe in Christ together.
That doesn’t mean that we all get along and that it’s kumbaya all the time.
It does mean that in this messy thing we call church,
we need each other.
The different voices and opinions and preferences make us stronger,
they deepen the pool, they help us.
We’re going to get sideways once in a while because what family doesn’t?
And when we do,
we have to figure it out.
Because as our family,
we don’t choose the children of God.
We’re sort of stuck together.
So this is the task of the church, to be community,
to shelter,
to nurture, and to have spiritual and real fellowship with one another.
And I think that our world is desperately hungry for real community.
In this age of social stuff and tweets and Twitter and whatever,
people hunger for real relationships,
places where they can be real people and with real people.
Some of them don’t even know they need it.
A place where someone genuinely cares about me and my life and what’s going on in it,
and the church is called to be that place.
It’s not the place with all the answers.
It’s not the place where we can explain everything.
It’s just the place that tries to have enough love to cover all the messy stuff.
It’s just the place that tries, in Christ’s name,
to be the church together.
Some of you might know the name Igor Stravinsky.
Stravinsky was a composer,
and he once wrote a piece with an absolutely brutal violin solo.
And after weeks of practice,
the soloist came to him and said,
“I cannot play this.
It’s too difficult.” And the legend is that Stravinsky said, “Yes, I know,
but what I’m after is the sound of someone trying to play it.”
And that’s the church.
The shelter, the nurture, and the fellowship,
spiritual fellowship of the children of God,
this ragtag bunch that we call the church.
Every person who wants to is trying to thinking about or actually following Christ.
And that’s too hard.
We can’t do it.
And Jesus says, “I know.
What I want to see is someone trying to do it.
What I want to see is someone doing their best to figure out how to be community.”
That’s why the church is here.
That’s one of our great ends,
one of our great aims.
And it’s what we’re called to be.
Let me stop there.
Sounds suspiciously like preaching.
I’m sorry.
I like this stuff.
But comments, questions, thoughts?
No?
I’m enjoying this if that’s important.
It’s not easy.
I really,
I don’t know,
church people, Christian people, there’s a lot of talk about sort of saving the church.
It’s in decline,
this and that.
Not a week goes by.
Michael and I don’t get a ton of mail about do this,
do that, sell you this,
try this.
And that’s not, that’s good.
All the church needs to be attractive is to act like the church.
When we do that,
when we care about people who are struggling,
when we welcome people well,
when we treat people the right way,
when we do the things that Jesus invites us to do,
see, it’s a pretty easy sell.
We want that.
We’re desperate for the things that the body of Christ offers.
I may be naive,
but I feel as if our church is doing a good job of trying.
I agree.
I agree.
I do not.
We had folks who visited the church in Texas,
and I would once in a while cringe.
You know, I see people approach them and I think,
oh, hope that goes well.
One of my best friends from down there,
the first Sunday he visited,
it was in the summer,
he didn’t wear a tie,
and one of our well-meaning police type ladies approached him and greeted him
and said, you know, you will find here that most of the men dress up.
And he didn’t tell me that until way later,
and I gave him credit for going back.
To his credit, he put on a tie and they came back the next week.
Is it okay to want people to wear ties?
Yeah, you probably don’t start there on their first Sunday.
But the point of that stand is I don’t worry too much about that.
I think,
in fact,
can I say this?
I don’t worry much that somebody is going to get greeted well here and be treated well here.
That’s something I think this congregation does really well.
In fact,
I don’t know if he loved me telling this story,
but I’m going to name him and just,
I don’t know, don’t tell him we talked about him.
But it’s been a couple of months ago.
It’s probably early winter.
We had a gentleman visit the church,
and you can often spot somebody maybe who isn’t a regular church person either here or maybe lots of places.
So we met him and he said he’d kind of been going through some struggles and had some issues and was trying to get back in church.
Well, church came and went,
and after church I was visiting with Darrell Arneson.
And Darrell asked me if I met this guy,
and I said, “Yeah, I had met him.”
He said, “Yeah, I had a talk with him too.
We’re having lunch Tuesday.”
I thought, “You know, of course you are,
because you’re Darrell Arneson.”
The idea that you just meet a guy and you find out he’s having struggles,
so you say, “Well,
let’s get together and talk.” And,
I mean,
that’s pretty good.
That’s what – I feel like that’s when the moments we kind of act like we’re supposed to act.
And the more we could do of that,
the better off we are.
But, yeah,
Stan, I mean,
this is a long,
rambling response to your comment,
but we get a lot of that right.
I mean, could we improve, of course?
Yeah. Well, I think I’m going to speak again.
We came to church,
we moved here, and we came to church probably nine years ago.
And I’ll name the two people that first greeted us,
and it was Stan and everybody.
They came over, they talked to us,
welcomed us,
invited us for coffee.
Then Gary and I had the very great idea to move to Spencer,
and we moved to Spencer.
And you know what we – Gary says,
“We’ll just have to get a church there instead of driving back and forth.”
We went to a number of churches,
and not one person greeted us.
Not one.
That’s the honest truth.
So it was Gary said,
“We’ll come back to this church.” And it’s really true.
This church is wonderful.
They’re caring,
they’re giving for us.
They can’t – you guys can’t do enough.
And that tells us that we should go out and share this with everybody to bring in that –
but you’re talking about that we need to nurture and care about people,
and they cared about us.
They invited us to their home,
and we’re very shy people,
and it meant the world to us.
I mean, we felt so loved.
We still feel so loved here.
We do.
And I think what Stan says,
“This church does a wonderful job.”
And I think it’s because our leader is telling
us great things about the Word of God and how that’s what message he wants us to go out and take to our people.
Well, first of all, I’m glad that you had that experience,
and I think that’s certainly a testimony.
I do think that’s sort of in the DNA of this congregation.
They were doing lots of that stuff before the Lovealls ever showed up and the Gwecky’s by extension.
But it is – what I appreciate about that,
Paulie, is this idea that Christian community is contagious.
That when you have been sheltered and nurtured and fellowship,
you naturally then want to provide that.
It becomes – you become a channel through which,
having experienced it, you want to now provide it.
And I think that’s great.
We had a similar experience.
This won’t surprise me, buddy.
I used to have – be pretty proud of a lot of my opinions.
And we visited a church my senior year of seminary.
I didn’t serve a church because I thought, “Well,
we’re going to do church for the foreseeable future,
so we’ll go to church together.”
We visited a church.
They handed us the bullet.
And I think the person who handed us the bullet might have mumbled,
“Good morning,” but no one else talked to us the whole time.
We sat next to some people.
They didn’t say anything to us.
So Tuesday of that week,
we get a letter,
“Dear Janie Clint,” because we signed the little thing.
“Get a letter.
Dear Janie Clint, awesome to have you with us.
It was great.
We enjoyed having you here.”
You know, that deal.
And so being a seminary student with lots of answers about church,
I decided the pastor needed to hear from me and wrote him a letter and basically said,
“If you enjoyed having us there,
you hit it well.” And no one talked to us.
I mean,
maybe it’d be better to talk to somebody than send them the letter.
But it was sort of looking back on that moment,
it was foundational in the way that I came to think about what the church has to do.
You know,
when someone comes here,
they may not stay here.
They may hate the preaching.
They may whatever.
They may not like something we do.
They may be more liberal, more conservative.
That’s all fine.
There’s lots of churches,
lots of options.
What I think we never want is someone to say,
“I came there and nobody cared.
It didn’t matter to them that I was there.”
And that’s not okay.
If this isn’t the place for them,
fine.
We’ll help them find the place it is if we can.
But to say,
“I went there.
You know, I have this thing.”
Those churches that struggle to greet people,
I have this scenario I play in my head where over the course of years,
God has been sending a coincidence,
sending a message,
and really working for a person until they finally one day get the courage to drive into a church and visit.
And then no one says hello to them.
And I imagine God saying,
“Do you know what it took to get down there?”
And you don’t say hello to them.
Come on, people.
We can do a little better than that.
So, again,
lots of reasons people could leave a church,
but the fact that no one cared that I came there isn’t a good one.
That happened to my sister and brother-in-law,
who moved quite a bit.
He worked for the government.
And anyway, they were Presbyterians,
and they moved to this one island,
Ellesville, Mars.
And they went to the Presbyterian church,
of course, and not a soul spoke to them.
No soul.
Yeah, that’s not okay.
And they went to,
two or three times,
and nobody ever spoke to them.
So they went to a Baptist church,
and people were all over.
It’s wonderful.
Yeah.
Well,
I told Sheila,
or my sister, and his name was Linda.
I said, “Linda,” I said, “Well, we tried the Presbyterian church here in town,
and I’ve never seen so many people,
so friendly.”
And they came up and wanted to know where we were from,
and all this kind of stuff.
And I said, “Boy, that was really unusual.
I was more in a Presbyterian.
I’ve been a Presbyterian over my life.”
Anyway,
we’re kind of known as conservative people,
being Scottish citizens.
And anyway,
she says,
“Are you sure it was a Presbyterian church?”
So basically,
in my attitude,
it’s the congregation,
it’s the people that are within the church,
that really make the church,
and are the ones that really welcome the people.
They all have that desire,
but they’ve got to have that common thought process,
and the capacity of being loving,
and wanting to visit with other people.
It certainly creates a more conducive environment to community,
for sure.
And I mean, you all,
I mean, I’m not telling any secrets.
There’s lots of things we don’t have figured out at First Press.
I mean,
we’ve got plenty
of room to grow,
but I think that is something that this congregation historically
has done really well.
Ria, did you have?
Well, I was just going to say,
you know, we’ve been here forever.
We came here
in the ’60s, early ’60s, and I can name today the families that just immediately took us in.
They had us over to their homes,
and just, you know, we were young and just married,
and we were just really welcome here.
And it certainly made us stay here.
Well, and to the point of continuity not probably shocking that you now are named as one of those couples for someone else.
I mean, but I don’t mean to single you out,
Ria, I just mean that it really is contagious.
When you’ve received it,
you want to provide that for other people.
Yeah, most of them have passed on now,
but someone else were one of them.
And then the people who used to live in your house,
House Mike and Michelle,
the Kipers,
they were in the Van Dykes.
Oh, it was just,
some of you remember them.
It was wonderful.
We feel that a lot too.
Like I grew up in this church,
but then when we went to college,
we went to a non-announational church,
and it was like an experience.
We grew a lot in our faith,
and there were thousands and thousands of people that were there,
like every Thursday night for a college worship.
And then we started going every Sunday also.
It was like a live concert.
It was like throwing your hand up in the air.
It was awesome.
It was an awesome experience.
We missed out a lot when we moved,
because that was kind of like our norm.
We really liked that.
But we just really loved being here.
I just feel like everybody always makes a big deal that we’re here,
and that we come to church,
and that we are the youngest people here.
Although, we
like to come here because of just every community.
You feel really welcome.
We should have been far too.
I know.
[laughter]
I will say, and then probably close with this,
one of the struggles I think churches have,
and as Katie has alluded to,
as churches grow,
how to maintain that sense of family.
And I think that is a barrier in some places.
I remember it wasn’t that long ago when we were having a conversation about a second service,
the most frequent comment I heard that expressed some concern about it was,
“Then I might not know everybody.”
That assumption that you are supposed to know everybody is built into that fabric of the family church model,
but at some point,
it becomes more about the people you encounter and maybe the subset of the larger group.
And so community,
as the church gets bigger,
community may not look like everybody at the same time,
but that sense of welcome,
that sense of hospitality,
that sense of connectedness still matters.
It still desperately matters.
I mean, really think about how many places you’re going to go and whether you’re Democrat,
Republican, blah, blah, blah, live in this part of town,
that part of town,
that you could expect the same greeting,
the same treatment.
And
sort of the idea,
the book of James,
James scolds the church, he says, “Look,
the rich guy comes in and you clear off a seat and say,
‘Hey, sit here.’ The poor guy comes in and you say,
‘Go sit over there.'”
And this idea that as a person passes through the doors of the church,
what they are to the world doesn’t matter,
that there’s something else when they get here.
They’re children of God.
And yeah, that’s a wonderful model for us.
Anything else?
Any last thoughts?
All right.
Well, thanks for your time.
Again, thank you to the folks who fed us this evening.
And I don’t know
what next week is,
but we’ll be back at it.
So, thanks.