Day 13 of Lent: "At The Same Time" {...divine tensions DO exist...}
Because I wrote, and I wholeheartedly live by, the words I wrote day before yesterday, I might be one of the more qualified persons you know, one of the safest people you know, to say this today:
Second to Christ Himself, membership in, participation with, God’s family is one of life’s top priorities.
(…prints available from a sold original titled “Hon Fleur”)
Yes, there exists a wonderfully beautiful theological truth behind the Hebraic Old Testament mandate of “a lamb for a household”.
AND it is equally true that God’s church is God’s idea, and it cannot be diminished, set aside, or even customized to fit our busy modern lives.
This is a “Both/And”. A divine tension.
“I” by myself do not constitute the bride of Christ. You, on your own, do not “the family of God” make. Your family does not “the family of God” make.
There’s a wily deception afoot in the culture that tries to make us believe that “time together as a family - just us” - must be guarded at all costs, and that “sowing into our marriage” is a large part of our Christian obligation. We are inclined to invest “on the home front” at the expense of our service to the community of saints…which has been, is, and always will be the family of God.
Some time ago, someone left a church ( I choose to refer to this like Paul did of one of his personal experiences, “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know”…”whether our church or another church, I shall not say”…) with no clear church home to which they would go. Now, they made this decision because of a perfect storm of other influences, but they weakly cited the call of Abraham (when he was Abram) to “leave his family, not knowing where he was going”.
There’s a couple of glaring issues with this line of thinking - both issues reveal a touch of understandable immaturity, but also a willful lack of Biblical, contextual understanding:
Abram was the prototype for the whole entity of the people of God in all of human history and eternity! (psssst: you and I are not. We’re just not as important. Much like we are also not Job, who was also a prototype, and aren’t you glad?)
God thought nothing of removing Abram from his family of origin, to establish the more important thing: the family of faith. It was one of God’s most foundational, and one of His earliest acts in His own plan of salvation.
So, their whole reason for leaving should have actually been their biggest, most Biblical reason to stick and stay: God is calling each of us into a far greater reality - and that reality is our participation in God’s household. My autonomous inclinations are to be set aside in favor of the overwhelming value of being a member of God’s family.
I am not saying that your family should not be a top priority.
I am saying that your family should make a local church family a top priority.
See the sweet difference? It’s in the outworking of it, fighting through the tension of it into greater freedom to pursue the heart of God together as a family, that actually makes for strong families. To be on journey to the Celestial City together, together seeking that city that has foundations whose builder and maker is God, it is that kind of togetherness which “tends towards” abundant life, in both marriage and family.
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.