What is Church?

Last week we held Vacation Bible School at our church.  We had a morning program, mostly for the children at our pre-school, a few of their older sisters and brothers, and a few of our congregation's children as well.

But this year, we added something new:  we offered two "family" evenings where we ate supper, learned to pray and share together, sang some Bible songs and did some crafts.  The theme of the week was "Jesus is the Light of the World", so some creative church members had created a scary cave that the children could walk through (but they had to do it with their parents).  There were glow-in-the-dark necklaces and candles to carry.  The children made pillowcases with a Bible verse.  They made glow-in-the-dark bracelets.  We sang "This Little Light of Mine" and a jazzed-up version of "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus" and learned some sign language.

Both nights were wildly successful.  The first night we had 83 people.  The second night was not as large, but we had so many opportunities to get to know each other that evening.  Everyone had fun both nights.

We invited them to come to church on Sunday and sing a couple of their Bible songs.

We had no idea what would happen, but we were excited.

On Sunday, only the families that were already members of our congregation came.

I have to admit, I was disappointed.  I wondered what I could have done differently.  I knew that many families are traveling on the weekends in the summer.  But still, I had hoped that one or two could join us for church.

Then, on Monday, I talked to our pre-school director.  She said something to me that made me think about the word "church".  It would have been nice if some of the families had come on Sunday, she said, but "what you did on Tuesday and Thursday night, THAT was church."

I thought about it.  What did we do on Tuesday and Thursday?  We ate. We prayed.  We shared our highs and lows.  We blessed each other.  We prayed.  We had fun.  We sang songs about Jesus.

She was right.  It was church.  We were the church, worshipping together.  What made us think it wasn't?  It wasn't Sunday morning, and we weren't in the sanctuary, but it was church.

What is church?

I think this is one of the hardest things for us to get our brains around these days.  What happens on Sunday in the sanctuary is important, but the sanctuary on Sunday morning is not the only church.  Maybe it's not even the most important church.  These days.

What is church?

Church is a holy gathering of people, and that was what was happening on Tuesday and Thursday evening, with parents and children and teenagers and grandmothers and grandfathers.  We didn't go far, just across the parking lot, but it was church over at the school those nights.

We didn't go far, but it was a start, and I hope we go farther, a holy gathering of people, sharing the light, being the church.

Stopping in at the Pre-School

I stopped in at the pre-school this afternoon.  It is right across from my church, and 'relating to the pre-school' was actually in my letter of call.  So, once a week, I lead a brief chapel service for one hundred or so pre-schoolers, and, lately, I have been stopping by for a half an hour or an hour, just dropping in on a couple of classes to see what they are doing.

At first, when I tried to stop over, I discovered it was nap-time, so I resolved to try a different time.  Today I stopped in late in the day, late in the week.  Everything was winding down for the weekend.

When I peeked in one classroom, the children were singing.  Their song was vaguely familiar.

As it turned out, they were learned to sing "Silent Night" in Spanish.  I stayed and listened, and resolved that I should learn Silent Night in Spanish too.  It seemed like a good idea.

After the singing was over, a small group of boys asked me to stay and play with them.  They got out a box of interlocking tubes, a toy that didn't exist when I was growing up.  The point is to put the tubes together in intricate designs and send marbles down along the tubes.  None of us was that good at putting together the tubes together, and at the end, we were just playing with the marbles.

I learned the boys' names, and that they were all four (although one of them claimed to be ten).

After awhile I ventured down to the kindergarten classroom.  That class looked pretty laid-back.  They were resting, and there was some down time to talk.  In a little while they were going to start watching a movie, but for a few minutes, we got to hang out.  They all wanted me to know when their birthdays were.  One little girl said she intended to invite me to her party.  I also learned their names and a few things they liked, especially their favorite colors.

I am not sure exactly what I am doing, stopping in at the pre-school.  It is not writing a sermon, or visiting a shut-in, or planning a worship service.  It is not visiting the superintendent of schools, or the mayor, or the chamber of commerce.  It is not strategic planning for the future.  It is just learning names and birthdays, and favorite colors, and building a tube.  I do not know what good I am doing, just that I am getting down on the floor, and then being all creaky when I stand up.

But "relating to the pre-school" is in my letter of call, so I have permission to do it.  I have permission to put down the heavy burdens of ministry for awhile, and play.  I have permission to take a break from dealing with grief and sorrow, to take a break from deep thoughts and difficult situations and the Future of the Church.  I have permission to sit on the floor, and sing songs and play with toys, and enter the Kingdom of God, where the Holy Spirit plays, and helps me remember who I am.

There are many things to do, but there is just one thing to be:  child of God.  There are many things to do, but one identity to nurture, and one name to become.  In everything we do, in every life we touch, in every mission of service or love or justice, there is just one strategy:  to learn the names.  To tell the names.  To tell them they are beloved.  To set them free to play.

What Makes Worship Good?

I don't know if it is just my particular neurosis, or if others share it, but I spend at least some part of every Saturday feeling unsettled.  I am thinking about Sunday worship, not only my words,  but the flow of the liturgy, how it all goes together, how it will be when we come together.  I pray over what I have prepared, but wonder about it.  Even if my sermon is all finished on Friday and my Saturday is relatively free, I still feel a little unsettled, thinking about it.

So, Sunday after church, and after the new member class, I thought:

Worship was good.

Just three words, nothing earth-shaking, no angel-choirs or trumpets, no big surprises.  But it made me wonder why I thought so.  What makes worship good?

It may be different for you, but here is what it was for me:

1.  There were generations present in church.  There was the college student and her mom, the two young girls in the front row.  There was a grandfather and his two grandchildren (and their parents too).    There was the matriarch of the church and one of our pre-school students.   There was an engaged couple, single parents, empty-nesters.  There were prospective members and visitors, too.  To me, it is not how many people are in church, but whether there are generations present that makes a difference.  It was enough.  It was good.

2.  I heard people singing together.  It might have been a hymn, or maybe it was a song, but I could hear the people singing out, and that made worship good.  It was a hymn they knew, believed, a song that made them want to sing at the top of their lungs.   Singing is at the heart of communal worship for me.  Sometimes, I will confess, it seems like we are losing the ability to sing together.  We don't know the same songs any more.  We don't all know the beat.  On Sunday, I heard my community singing.  And it was very good.

3.  I heard someone speak from the heart.  It was the beginning of our stewardship emphasis, and one of our members spoke at both services about her commitment to her congregation, and, more than that, about her love for her Lord.  She spoke her own words.  No one gave them to her.  She spoke about the places she services, and why.  She spoke about the grace that makes her open her hands to give.  And it was good.

4.  The Holy Spirit was there.  Every week, this is true, whether I feel it or not.  The Holy Spirit comes with each Spirit-filled child of God present.  I have an old CD by the Blind Boys of Alabama.  The title is "I Brought Him With Me."  In other words, I didn't come here to find God -- I brought God here with me, and because of that, this place is filled with the spirit of God.  The church is holy because God's holy people, saints and sinners, are present.

Other things make worship good for me as well, I'll admit:  when a line of a song moves me to tears, when I see someone I haven't seen in a long time, when we take a risk together, do something new, learn a new gesture, ask a question.  These things make worship good for me.  They make me think:  we are learning to trust God more, and trust each other.

What makes worship 'good' for you?

You Say You Want To Be Inclusive

My church wants to be more inclusive.  We have been saying this for awhile now.  We have been saying it more and more, as we look around the neighborhood where we are located, and notice that more and more people who live here don't look like "us".  Some of our neighbors are immigrants, and speak other languages.  Some of our neighbors have less money than "us" or are from different ethnic groups than those traditionally associated with our denomination.

So, my church wants to be more inclusive.  We understand (or at least a substantial number of us do) that it is theologically right for us to want to be more inclusive.  We understand that the realm of God is much more diverse than our congregation.  We understand that when we gather at the river, by and by, when we look around at who is gathered with us, it will look a lot different than our congregation does now.  Our hearts are in the right place, as far as it goes.

But I suspect, deep down in my heart, that we have no idea how hard it will be, how hard it really is.  For one thing, we don't even know each other -- not really.  We don't know many of the daily experiences and stories of the people in the pew next to us.  We don't know that some of "us" have less than we think they do, struggle more than we think they do, feel differently than we think they do.  Sometimes I worry that we do not always want to know.  I also suspect that the very word, "inclusive" even has something to do with it.

In the aftermath of the deaths of two unarmed black men, and the grand juries' decisions not to indict the police officers responsible, the slogan #BlackLivesMatter has taken hold.  Though the experiences of people of color often teaches them a different reality, they want to take back the value of their lives.  #BlackLivesMatter, they tell us.  Can we say "Amen"?  Can we affirm that yes, black lives matter, even when so many of their daily experiences tell them otherwise?

But some people want to be more inclusive.

So there is an alternative meme going around:  #AllLivesMatter.  And, although I understand the sentiment, just like I understand the desire of my congregation to be more inclusive, I think it is fundamentally misguided.

We can talk about the value of human life, each life, all lives, in different ways.  We can talk about the realities experienced by people of color, by immigrants, by at-risk children, by the poor, by Alzheimers patients.  But as long as we continue to speak in generalities (We Welcome Everyone!), we are not really welcoming anyone.  As long as we don't listen to the realities of particular people, and particular communities, we won't know how to welcome anyone.  As long as we don't pay attention to the lives, the realities, the stories of those who feel left out, excluded, marginalized, un-welcome, we will not be able to include them.

#BlackLivesMatter.

It's a start.  If we really want to be inclusive.

Tiny Dancers and Children in Church

We held very simple Advent services on Wednesday evening this year.  We used Holden Evening Prayer, read an Old Testament Reading and read a children's story.  We worshipped around tables in our Fellowship Hall rather than in the Sanctuary.  We had confirmation students bring in the cross and candles and had candles at every table.  We had a few small children take the offering.

I loved hearing the congregation singing together in the round, even in a room with not the best acoustics in the world.  We know the liturgy well enough now that some people felt bold to sing different parts on the canon, even if they were sitting right next to each other.

We had hoped that the service would be short and engaging for families with small children.  But, truth be told, there were only a very few small children (all of the confirmation students came every week).

On the last Wednesday, there were a few more small children.  They were all pre-school age.  One of them had been coming every Wednesday with her grandmother.  Another one was the daughter of our children's ministry coordinator.

Though they were glad to be with us for worship, I could tell that they were also excited and antsy.  They had a hard time paying attention to the story.  It had pretty pictures, and there were opportunities to count down the Advent candles, but other parts of the story were too hard for them to understand.

Toward the end of the service, though, we began the prayer litany.  With piano and violin accompanying, we began to sing, "God of mercy, hold us in love."  The soloist also began, "In peace, in peace, we pray to you."

And two of the little girls began to dance.

They put out their arms as if they were ballerinas; they bumped into each other a couple of times.  They did not understand the words, but they understood the music.  If they had been a little older, I would have said they were tiny liturgical dancers.

Their parents were understandably chagrined.  Children need to learn how to behave in church.  This was a time of prayer, after all.  We were praying for the sake of the world.  And their daughters were dancing.

Yet, I thought that their dance was beautiful.  They were graceful in their smallness, arms flung out, listening to the violin as if it were the voice of God.  They were praying, too, even though they didn't know it. Perhaps we can teach them:  not to sit still, but to believe that all of their movements, their tears and their laughter, are sent up to God, as an offering, as incense.

Perhaps we can teach them, but then we would have to know it too:  we would need to know that church is for sitting still and for dancing, for weeping and for laughter, and that all of it, all of us, is offered up to God, as incense.

Perhaps we can teach them.  Perhaps they can teach us, too.

What Love Looks Like

My father died last week.  His funeral was Saturday morning, at my parents' church.

It was a beautiful, clear day.  Members of the Swedish men's chorus my dad had belonged to showed up.  They sang three songs.  My dad's two older sisters were there, my mom's older sister and younger brother, and a number of cousins, too.  There were friends of my parents there, some who had known them since they were first married well over fifty years ago.  I thought I was doing pretty well until one of my cousins came up to me, just before the service started, and said, with tears in her eyes, "I am going to miss your dad."

I sat between my mother and my sister.  She sang alto on all the hymns.  I tried to sing high tenor on a couple of them, but I don't reach the high notes like I used to.  Besides, I was crying.  My nephew, who leads a local rock band, played a portion of the song "Misty" as part of the remembrances.  He learned "Misty" just because his grandfather liked that song.

After the service and the luncheon, we all went home to rest for awhile.

Then, later in the evening, I drove up to my mom's house, where my sister was staying for the week.  The three of us drove from there to my brother's house.  Then my brother drove all four of us to a bar where my nephew's band was head-lining.  He was supposed to go on at 10:00 p.m.  A couple of my cousins joined us as well.

So there we were, at 10:00 p.m., sitting around a dark, smoky room, munching appetizers and drinking iced tea, listening to noisy and unknown (to us) bands, waiting for my nephew to appear.  One of my cousins was teasing my mom about whether she would be part of the "mosh pit" (terminology that I had just recently learned).  Later on, when my nephew started, we made our way up to the stage, where the beat of the drums and the bass made our hearts skip.  We watched my nephew as he took on his "rock star" personality.   At one point, my nephew used bad language.  One of my cousins reached out to cover my mom's ears.

All of us think my nephew is very talented.  We are all very proud of him.  But, to be honest, for at least some of us, this was not "our kind of music".  It also wasn't the kind of venue that we would probably think of attending on our own.  We weren't there because we were hard rock music fans.

We were there because of love.

Especially I think of my mom.  She's never been a big fan of bars.  In fact, until her grandson started playing music there, I'm not sure she ever set foot in one.  But there she was, until all hours of the night.  She wouldn't have been any other place.

When I think about the mission of the church, why it succeeds, why it fails, I don't think it has to do so much with strategy as it has to do with love.  It doesn't matter what kind of strategy you have, if you don't have love that will impel you to go places you would never otherwise go, and do things you would never otherwise do.  It's as simple, and as difficult, as that.

So, on Saturday, my mother went to church for a funeral for her husband.  And she went to a bar for a rock concert by her grandson.

That is what love looks like.

The Gift of All Ages

(this is an addendum to my post, "The Gift of Gray Hairs", of a couple of weeks ago).

Before becoming the associate pastor at my current congregation, I was fortunate to serve three small congregations in rural South Dakota.  I was there for about four years, and I never felt that I did anything big or spectacular there (but that's a subject for another post).  But I did some small things, and I learned a lot.

One of the small things that I did while I was there was think of a few "intergenerational events" that we could do as a parish.  I wanted to find activities that got the three churches together; I also wanted to get us out of our age-specific silos sometimes.  So one time the whole parish did a service project together,   youth and seniors and little kids -- we all served a meatball dinner at a place called "The Banquet" in Watertown.  We also once had a fellowship event, an "I Hate Winter" party one Sunday night at the pool in the nearest larger city.  (The "I Hate Winter" party had to be postponed once on account of a blizzard.)

I remember when the group was together at the pool on Sunday night, the lifeguard pulled me aside and said, "What kind of a group is this, anyway?"

"We're a church," I answered.

"I just don't see adults and children playing together very often," she said.

I thought about that for awhile.  In school, and in any number of enrichment events, and even in churches that have large and glitzy children's programs, children are segregated into into age specific groups.  There's a lot of wisdom in this.  Sometimes.  I mean, I know that children of different ages learn in different ways.  But I also have to ask:  if we are talking about faith formation, and if faith formation is important to us, how does that happen?

Certainly, faith formation happens in those age-specific groups where children are all bonding with others in their age group.  But I suspect that there is also a lot of faith formation that only happens when we form bonds with one another beyond our own generation.

Gray hairs are a gift -- that's the truth.  But in truth, in the body of Christ, every age is a gift, and we are meant to sing and pray and serve and play together.

And perhaps, when we do this, once in awhile, someone will even turn to us and say, "What kind of a group are you, anyway?"