It turned out the Bride of Christ was broken; yes, but she was so beautiful to me when I found her out here in the desert,
in the world, and in the Anglican church, and the emerging church, and the house church, and the organic church, and the Vineyard church, and online, and in coffee shops, and in the woods, and even/especially in the people I still think are wrong, wrong, wrong about stuff.
Can you be whole and full in Christ without spilling over? Can you be loved without yearning to love in return? Can you be healed without wanting to heal? Can you receive goodness without wanting to point every other fellow beggar on the road to the source of that goodness? Can you deconstruct without wanting to rebuild someday?
Can you be restored to God without being restored to the people of God, too?
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t. Loving Jesus meant learning to love and celebrate His Church.
But the Church isn’t a non-profit status anyway. It’s not four-walls-and-a-baptismal-font. Church isn’t a club, and it isn’t a membership, and it isn’t a set of beliefs, and it isn’t one doctrine. It isn’t Sunday morning liturgy or performance. It’s bigger and more. The people of God gather in ways so different. All that matters is that we gather together somehow, to love, to live out the mission of God and the Gospel, to eat together, and feed each other.
Church is the family of God.
And I found my family everywhere.
I could care less about labels. I could care less about demarcations and boundaries. I know where I find God and community, and that’s okay. I know you might find both God and true community elsewhere, and that’s okay, too. And we’ll both probably shift and change, and switch places now and then. The only lyrics for the song in my heart are Love and Freedom; yes, life in Christ is a life of LOVE and a life of FREEDOM.
A love for the Church has blossomed like a garden in that wilderness, free and wild and hopeful and unexpected.
I still feel rather protective about my desert-self, just like I feel protective of every one still there; I never want to forget how it feels to be there. I want to remember, to honor your journey, your in-between-space. I want to grab your hand and tell you to lean into it. I want to remember that it looks different for all of us, and that no one is more surprised than me that my journey has lead me here, back again.
And, when I realized that God was restoring church to me, giving me back my joy in intentional community, in Sunday mornings, and Bible studies, and tithe check numbers, in the gathering of the Body to worship, and learn, and support, and eat, and scatter back out to our world. Eeven in the calling of my husband to pastor, I laughed at the irony, and I laughed gently at myself, and I laughed because I was happy.
I only came back to church when I didn’t care if I ever went back.
I only came back to church when I found Church everywhere.
