Tiny False Imitations of Heaven: An honest perspective of the potential of God’s church
I love God’s family. I am so thankful to be counted among the adopted brothers and sisters of Christ Jesus. I love singing with fellow believers, feeling God’s Holy Spirit sway inside me to the music, feeling every cell in my body from my vocal cords to my feet to my hands respond to this wonderful form of worship. I love hearing God’s word spoken out loud like listening to the building blocks of God’s kingdom come together. An entire church service can be such a great experience with God’s Holy Spirit filling the sanctuary, connecting His people, encouraging us. teaching us, strengthening us and connecting us to each other. Sunday school can be so much fun being able to gather with friends to pour over God’s words and life’s challenges then encouraging each other and praying for each other. I love getting together for lunch afterwards, lively conversation, laughter and good food. I love Bible Studies during the week with my sisters in Christ diving into a really good study like Beth Moore and Jennie Allen. I remember when a Priscilla Shirer study introduced me to the voice of God’s Holy Spirit. At the foundation, it is wonderful and I truly love it. I remember reading in Rachel Held Evan’s book, Searching for Sunday:
“The first thing the world knew about Christians was that they ate together. At the beginning of each week they gathered – rich and poor, slaves and free, Jews and Gentiles, women and men – to celebrate the day the whole world changed, to toast to resurrection. While each community worshiped a bit differently, it appears most practiced communion by enjoying a full meal together.” (Chapter 2)
I love all my memories from my young adult life gathering with friends and fellow believers laughing as we ate, full of unity, food and fellowship.
Over the years, I don’t know, its just not what it was supposed to be and the vision of what church could be has been eroded. I realize that God’s church is made up of imperfect people. I actually used the excuse of broken people serving broken people. Honestly, though, that feels more like the saying, “Boys will be boys.” That is the excuse we use to let boys and men get away with hurting people and having bad attitudes. Can we really afford to have an excuse for God’s church getting away with hurting people? I reminded myself and others that churches are hospitals, not country clubs but honestly, I think they have become country clubs.
Where are the broken? Where are the neurologically divergent and eccentrics? Where are the addicts, depressed, broken? What is the purpose of “Sunday best”? When did so very different and diverse people stop fellowship together? When did church leadership all have to be cohesive and same? When did individual churches become so monochromatic?
When did smiling pretty become so mandatory? When did messy emotions start needing to be tied up in ties and cardigans?
I ask myself this because one thing I know about God is the times when I am at my weakest or worst or most uncomfortable is when I am able to see God do his greatest.
The time that I came closest to the face of Abba was when I screamed at him on my knees, crying, broken on the floor of my home after my second miscarriage. I was far away from family and friends. I was in so much emotional pain, raw, real, alone but that was the time I felt God’s arms the tightest, the time I felt him wrap me in his love and I knew he was there. I didn’t even have clean clothes on if I remember let alone a dress and pearls. I was on the floor of my messy house in my greasy hair. Oh but that feeling of God’s arms wrapping me up. I knew in that moment exactly what it is when Jesus wept. I felt his tears mingle with mine and overflow out of my broken heart pooling on the carpet under my cheek. I knew such sweet sweet fellowship. Not once did I feel God lift me up but he let me be in my pain, hurting with no admonishment to clean up or smile.
It was later in a new town, in a Sunday school class when a friend, raw in her own pain, shared crying that after suffering through a miscarriage, she was pregnant again, bleeding and terrified she would lose this baby as well. The group stopped everything else, laying hands on her, praying over her and her baby. I cried along with her praying the love I felt in my own pain pour from me into her. I felt the raw humanity of others reveal God’s healing love and strength flow from others, from places of knowing pain.
If these are moments strung together to create the rope of fellowship that ties us together, binds us to each other then why not let that be what we portray? Can it not be what we choose to walk out every single day? And trust me, there have been times when pain has been met with sharp rebukes to stuff that pain down because it takes away from the shiny Sunday best requirement. I recall my husband coming home dejected from a men’s breakfast. When the speaker asked the men to share times when they were hurt by their fathers, my husband spoke up, sharing his pain of rejection, desiring healing through unity. He was met with admonishment for speaking up, for sharing publicly. Men don’t share their trauma, they stuff it behind Ralph Lauren Polo shirts stiff with stiff starch and “manliness”.
I am forever an optimist and an idealist. How wonderful to know we can experience the messiness of life in the healing hands of Jesus through our brothers and sisters in Christ while simultaneously participating in the beauty of community worship on Sunday morning and any other time we choose to. I’ve experienced it time and time again and I desire to make it the norm rather than the exception. My heart cries out for a deeper fellowship and the kind of healing that God employs through the deep abiding fellowship of His children.
C.S. Lewis has this really awesome quote. “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
We are not meant to make this earth our comfortable place. It is our place to continue growing, learning and sharing. I do not desire to make a tiny false imitation of Heaven out of my church congregation. Heaven is for Heaven but today is for getting my hands dirty in the earth doing the work of my Father who has sent me.
Just as the Jewish Christians were tasked with inviting in the Gentile Christians, we are tasked as well to be the unified Church. As basic human beings, we crave the company and easy path of surrounding ourselves with those who are like us. I can honestly say, my pulse does not quicken when someone shows up wearing a sports jersey but if I find out someone loves reading or painting as much as me, I swoon. Its fun to share those things. I get it but God’s children are a beautiful mosaic and tapestry of colors and different threads made up of cashmere, cotton, silk, burlap and wool. No two are the same and our church can represent that. We can do that! We can diversify our leadership and our Sunday schools to reflect the diversity in our body no longer seeking monochromatic -homogeneous clicks but unify under the beautiful spectrum of God’s artistry in his children.
As the Church, we are called to fellowship. It is good and right and wonderful. To be with our brothers and sisters in Christ is exactly what we should do to support each other and love each other where we are, through our circumstances and in our humanity and hopefully with lots of food.