While talking to Charlie the other evening, I shared a thought that God dropped on me while I was doing the dishes. Charlie asked if I would write it out for his blog and that folks, is why you’re stuck with this glimpse into the wife’s mind.
It has now been about 10 months since Charlie left his position in church ministry and since that time we have been faced with the question of which church community we should call home. Neither of us has ever really had a start-from-scratch church hunt before and it is a challenge. It’s a question that lately has been on my mind the majority of the time. I think it’s really important to be an involved and committed member of a church family and this search is leading me to ask a lot of questions about what a church should be, what it should look like and what things are most important to me in a church.
We’ve kind of nailed our decision down to two possible church families and are now really evaluating where would be the best fit. We’re asking what I think are legitimate questions in this process and I’ve been getting frustrated at not sensing clear answers. Until I was doing the dishes the other day…
It struck me that maybe we’re not asking a big enough question. The questions flying through my mind have included things like:
“Where will we be most fed by the sermon content?”
“Where will our children be able to make strong connections with other children who love Jesus?” “Where we will gain a strong social network?”
“What types of ministries are there to get involved in?”
“Where are these churches headed? What are their core values”
and the list goes on.
Good questions, right? Maybe not the one God wants to answer. It flew into my mind that if life is about glorifying God then the question we should be asking is this:
“Which church community does God want us to be part of so that His kingdom will be furthered?”
I believe that if we start praying that, then God will clearly lead where he wants us to go. I also believe that if we go where God wants us, then all of those other questions will be answered on the way. He’ll meet our needs because that is what God does. I just seem to forget it all too often.
So, that’s the thought from the Mrs. Remember… it was Charlie’s idea.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to create new and fresh experiences and expressions of worship in my life. It’s been an interesting time. I’ve also started rereading Praise Habits by David Crowder. I really appreciate his perspective on creating a lifestyle of worship. I just read this section on page 27 of the book:
“I have tried to develop a habit of having a “quiet time”. Sometimes it would stick. Sometimes it would not. Guilt would be thick when it would not. But for a long period it became what I did first thing every day. It was beauty. The internal joy it brought was overwhelming. Then at some point it went hollow. It’s not that it was a bad idea to form a habit of a quiet time, but the habit had slyly begun to suck the life out of my relationship with God. I had fallen in love with my spirituality rather than with the one whom I sought, and in the end it left me void and wanting. A frightening aspect of habit attached to our spiritual formation is that inherent in the idea of habit is the possibility for meaningless ritual. With the formation of habit there is a subtle abdication of consciousness in our actions. This can twist things that were intended to bring life into cold and empty ritualistic experiences. Indeed we are broken. We do bad things without thinking and when we try to do good things they often end up warped. How can we maintain life in our spiritual formation?”
One of the things that lead to me needing to leave ministry was the exhaustion I was feeling about planning worship services. Both the planning and leading of the services became such a “cold ritual”. What was suppose to be moving me closer to God had “begun to suck the life out of my relationship with God.” I worked really hard to prevent that by trying to keep things in our services fresh and by making sure I was ready spiritually to lead but I couldn’t do it anymore. The confines of planning worship times for a large group of people who all have their own needs and expectations was too much.
Don’t get me wrong I loved my job. LOVED IT. I loved trying to create new experiences for us as a congregation and shaping where we were going, I really loved working with and engaging the young people we had involved and I really miss it. But I became bitter. I felt that I was just a dealer providing junkies an empty ritualistic experience. (I don’t believe that was true but it was how I felt)
Now I’m thinking through the things I do and things we (universally) do as a church and really trying to examine what has become old and stale (even if it started with right intentions)? What habits or ways of thinking are holding me back from moving closer to God? Or am I just crazy (don’t answer that) and making bigger issues of things that aren’t important?
A friend of mine posted this on Facebook. It’s totally absurd but very funny. If you need a laugh and have less than two minutes to spare it’s worth it.
Every church talks about how the ministry they are doing is “not about building up our church” and that it’s about God’s Kingdom. For the most part that may be true but quite often (in my experience anyway) most churches usually function on their own and separate from other congregations in the same community. That it’s about God’s kingdom but we would never help that other church over there.
The church we’ve started getting established with after our transition out of ministry is a very small congregation. Over the past number of years it has gone through a couple of splits and had some very serious issues. It is a very small congregation at this point. The average Sunday attendance is probably in the 45-50 range.
They hired a new Senior Pastor about three years ago and hired a second full-time pastor at the beginning of this year. These two gentlemen are doing an incredible job leading the church forward, helping shape the vision and structure of the church and facilitating healing from the past.
One of the really cool things they are doing is creating and leading in opportunities for multiple congregations in the city to work together on a number of projects. Between partnering with other churches to host community meals or jumping at every chance to take part in city wide worship experiences, they are trying to cultivate the attitude of being one congregation within a larger church instead of trying to be the only church.
There is currently a new and very small church plant in the city that is home church based and run in a very needy area of the city. There is no denominational affiliation with our church but our church invited them to have a joint service. We shared our facilities, the sermon for the morning was a joint effort and then we all had lunch together as well. It was a great morning.
Now, here’s the really cool thing. Keep in mind we are a church of approximately 50 people with two full time staff. We have a building and all the costs that come with that so money is super tight. At the end of the service our pastor turns around and hands the other church’s pastor a cheque. My mouth hit the floor. The other pastor looked incredibly surprised and was quite overcome by the gesture.
I have no idea how much that cheque was for. To be honest it doesn’t matter. In all my years of church attendance I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve heard how it’s not our church’s money and blah blah blah. I’ve seen churches send large amounts of money overseas or far away. But I have never seen a church give money to another local church just to bless them and help them in their ministry. To acknowledge that they have the potential to reach people that our church can’t and to help them do it rather than build up and protect our own group of people.
This simple act of showing (not saying) that it’s about advancing God’s kingdom by any means possible, even if it means supporting a neighbouring (or some people might say competing) church was one of the things that cemented my decision to get involved with this community.
