In a coffee shop the other day, I met with someone who had visited our church. He had some questions, and he said, in passing as we were leaving, that it was easy to be a Christian when you were at church.
“It’s the rest of the week that’s hard”.
He’s absolutely right. The hour or so we are in church – where God’s name is exalted, where we sing songs of praise and worship, where we pray as a community and study the ancient scriptures together – that is the absolutely easiest hour we have all week.
For many of us who grew up in the church, Sunday attendance was THE defining mark of our experience of what it means to be Christian. It was the evidence of our faith. We left aside our “secular” lives and entered each week into this Holy space as a way to show our love of God. There we would sing God songs and have God talk and then go back to our worldly lives.
That’s no longer how I think of church.
In the first place, I resist the idea of a division of holy and secular, as if there are parts of the world that belong to the world and other parts that belong to God. In his poem How To Be A Poet, Wendell Berry says, There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.
I 100 percent agree with that.
It’s all sacred. It’s all holy. It all belongs to God. My work as a pastor and someone else’s work as a plumber and someone else’s work as a mother may be different kinds of work, but it is all sacred. The trees that bend in the wind are as sacred as the altar at the front of our sanctuary.
The danger for churches if you talk about this too much is that people then start to wonder why, if your church building is not more Holy than the river bank or the park, they need to come to your church after all.
I believe we need church because the primary purpose of church is not to encounter God – although for some people that may happen. And it’s not to have a religious experience – although for some people that may happen. And it’s definitely not to show the world around you that you are a Christian – and I would suggest that if that is the primary evidence of your Christianity, you may need to reexamine how you live your life.
We need church because church is not the pinnacle of your Christian experience, and not the place where God is portioned out in metered doses in breaks from your “normal” life, but rather a support group for your practice of Christianity. It’s like a 12 step meeting for your life – one that gives you support and tools to live the other 167 hours a week until you will be back. It’s a group of people who are committed to practicing together, who get it wrong and need help in getting it right, who laugh and pray and eat together to remind them that we are working to make it on earth as it is in heaven.
Not just for sixty minutes on Sunday morning, but 168 hours a week.