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The Church Worth Coming Back To (A Message For The Left-Out)


Last year I found myself in frigid, uncharted waters.

For the first Sunday in 17 years, I was not on staff at a local church; waking-up without a group of students and families to care for and without a building to drive to. No sermons to give, no songs to sing, no greetings to deliver.

With the suddenness and messiness of the transition of those first few days, I knew there would be grief and confusion to process, and the dizzying flood of conflicting emotions that comes with any major life change. (In a year that saw me lose my dad, leave a job, move our family, and now be leaving another job, I fully expected those feelings of loss and sadness to come, and they have).

However, the one thing I didn’t expect to feel so instantly and so sharply in response to losing this central part of my life—was relief.

There was an almost tangible exhale in my spirit, which was both sadly surprising and yet so very welcome.

Some of this was certainly due to the fatigue and exhaustion of this season and of all the pain and frustration we’ve experienced as a family, but much more than that I believe it was my heart’s deep response to being temporarily free from something oppressive and damaging and hurtful; The Church.

For as long as I can remember I’ve struggled to find my place in this Body of Christ, feeling passionately jealous to redeem and rescue it and yet so often completely and simultaneously repulsed by it.

Then, for the first time in over a decade and a half I was released to do that wrestling without having to shepherd a community or to represent anyone’s faith journey but my own.

It’s been a liberating, disorienting, terrifying soul space to be in.

Over the years, people have often asked me whether I’d ever want to start a church, and I’ve never had much interest. To me it always smacked of ego and religious elitism; as if the thousands of churches already filling our rural roads and suburban strip malls hadn’t quite cracked the code.

More than anything though, I would just say that I wasn’t “called” to lead a church before. I’m not wired that way.

Yet ever since those first few awkward days as a “non-professional” Christian, I’ve begun to look at things differently for the first time.

Even as I took some of my first civilian breaths and discovered what life feels like unfettered by a religious staff role, I wondered if there are other people out there like me; people who crave something that they believe The Church to be but rarely, if ever see.

These days, I’m thinking a lot about those voiceless multitudes I’ve met here through these writings:

Those who’ve been damaged, marginalized, excluded, and overlooked by the local church.

Those who feel left-out, pushed-out, and worn-out by the selfishness, dysfunction, nepotism, greed, and unadorned hate that they’ve experienced there; those sidewalk beggars practically starving for the crumbs of something that feels more like Jesus.

So as a part of me greatly rejoices at the very thought of never reconnecting with the Body in the way I had before, a bigger part of me still dreams of what could be, of what a Church worth coming back would look like for so many.

It those dreams…

– It would be a truly open-door ministry, one that would speak to the outliers, the broken, the hurting, the forgotten, and the rejected because it saw them not as simply souls to save, but as necessary members of the Body “as-is”.
– It wouldn’t be about a pastor but about a people; a community whose identity was corporately formed as they sought and served Jesus together.
– It would be a safe place for people to bring their questions and doubts; where the messiness of pursuing faith would be a welcomed given.
– It would be about that faith as a conversation; something living and regularly moving and changing for each person.
– It would grow out of true community, not entertainment-based events, built on relationships before worship services. (It may not even have traditional worship gatherings).
– It wouldn’t assume that the people we want and need to reach will just come to us, but that we’ll need to go to them; not to preach at them, but to live with them.
– It would be as much about loving people while they’re living here on earth, as getting them to Heaven after they die.
– It would be a ministry where success is measured only by life change over time.

I really have no idea where our path leads with all of this.

I don’t know if this Church even exists or whether I need to find it or build it or simply surrender to the notion that it only lives as a white-hot ember, embedded deep within in my heart—and then just live with the burn.

What I do know, is that I think a lot of people need this Church. Maybe you do.

I think it’s the Church that Jesus has been waiting for us to give His people.
It’s the Church that can feel like really Good News to everyone.

I think it’s the Church worth coming back to for both of us.

 

 

 

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