Day 12 of Lent {We're Still Standing - Quite Well, In Fact...}
After a year-long pandemic, after a year of “pandemic pastoring” (which is 3x the labor and for me, 3x the anxiety) I was a little stunned to see a full house at church today. We’ve added several families, and someone made the observation that we might have to get more chairs! And someone else made the observation that he didn’t sense a bit of fear in this fellowship of saints.
He was correct. Though we did spend the whole year either live streaming only, or having parking lot services, or having hard-core socially distant services, with FOUR overflow rooms downstairs, and a color coded system that other churches in our area ended up copying and adapting for their use.
But today felt different. It felt special and almost…dare I say it…normal.
We adored it. We had a full house (with masks available, and social distance options located downstairs) and we were overjoyed about it.
After church, half of our folks headed on home or to a local restaurant (our restaurants are still socially distant, here in TN) and half of our church fam stayed around…again, a year of being told that gathering should be “taboo” has only served to create a determination in our church to gather.
I shot about 20 seconds of video, right before The Preacher and I headed to lunch with a church friend, sweet Steve Homer. Half the church took their fellowship outside, some left, and some were still inside where I was. I wish I had thought to grab my phone immediately after our worship concluded - just to celebrate the full sanctuary of my church.
No one ever wants to go home. Not at my church. And we get there early to pray. To P R A Y. Like, we just….pray. The turn-out is amazing. We haven’t had children’s ministry for a YEAR (pandemic problems - our children’s ministry workers, including yours truly, most of them are front line workers throughout the pandemic. These are precious people who are paid hourly, with no sick days or time off given should they have contracted the virus. They had to protect themselves as much as they could. My situation was one of protecting my dad as much as possible, so I stopped teaching preschool last February.
Yet these young families still come.
And they come early. And they PRAY.
Then they worship and they give (and give willingly and joyfully) such that everything we needed to do to keep going, AND everything we needed to do to make building improvements, AND everything we needed to do to bless others has gotten done. AND you can’t make them leave when we’re done. They hang around talking and laughing and praying for one another, and making plans to get together later in the week.
See the beautiful girl with the camera? She’s our resident visual scribe. She takes the pictures that tell our stories, and she’s amazing and gifted at what she does.
I think about many of these people all week long. Truly. They come to my mind often. I have begun crafting words from the Lord for them. I’ve begun writing down my prayers. I have files on them. Ha! Not in a creepy way, but in a “I-care-for-your-soul” way. I write down their prayer requests, any food allergies, what I fed them the last time they were in my home, and when the Lord gives me something for them, or another 5-fold minister comes and ministers to them, I try to write it down. To me, this is what new covenant church friendship looks like. We don’t just meet on Sunday, we think of one another through the week.
You see, my rule of life isn’t just in the wider context of “the body of Christ”. It is also found in a specific faith community called “local church”. This is where I live out raw and mostly unfiltered New Testament Christianity, amongst trusted spiritual friends.
These people know me the best and wish me the best because of covenant - not because I remember their favorite color or can keep up with everyone’s specific food preference (I can’t) they don’t love me because I am an ideal spiritual leader and preacher’s wife. I am wildly imperfect, and sometimes inconsistent, especially since “the change” took place, and my brain and my body seek new normal. Without the aid of anything pharmaceutical. Whatsoever.
Oh. And if you don’t think that’s a THING…I’m not sure we can be friends. Because the last 5 years have been brutal, sometimes, between hot flashes, mood swings, grief, and monumental physiological shifts - but I have never left my post.
Why? Why has it been so important to me, to be found at my post? Well, oneness with real people at a real address under a real roof was of supreme importance to Jesus, it was important to the life of all the early church, and it must be important to me.
It does little good to proclaim personal salvation without moving into tangible shared community. Even when that community does not meet our needs, and does not feel like community - that’s when it is community at its most transformative. Because our greatest need is to pull our head out of pop culture’s armpit, and serve something besides our own agenda!
We live in an upside down inside out Kingdom, see.
So proud to call HARVEST CHURCH KNOXVILLE ( #thescruffychurchforthescruffycity) my home church.
