On Church

In my classes at the university, I like to start the semester with a little "get to know you" questionnaire for my students. Most questions are dance related...how long they have danced, what other type of movement they are involved with/have studied etc. But at the end, I ask them to tell me three random things that they want me to know. This semester, one of the six (yes, six!) boys in my beginning modern dance class wrote about how he grew up going to a Christian school where he would have been expelled for dancing, and "needless to say, he is not a Christian any more."

Sigh.

This, my friends, is why I generally avoid writing about the institution of the church. Because it undeniably brings up baggage, and icky feelings, and hurt. Because the church is so different from faith in God - the church is an institution built by broken people who constantly mess things up. The above story is one of many I could tell about people I love being wounded and betrayed by churches. And, many times, after hearing people's stories, I don't blame them for running away from faith. But I wish I could somehow explain to them the difference between the church and God and Jesus, somehow make it less black and white. That being said, I get that for some people out there, people who've been really wounded, this just isn't possible.

But today, in thinking about all of the above, I'd like to write about something else: why I love the church. Yes. Indeed I do.

I've been thinking about what the church means to me lately quite a bit, as we're about to make a big shift in our own church life. This next Sunday, our church is launching a site in downtown Madison, at a very lovely little theatre where I love to see my favorite band (okay, enough of the links...). It means a change, unknown at that, in a church culture and world I've just really begun to feel comfortable with, and it means an unknown future for the shape of our lives and church and, logistically, Paul's job. Couple all of this with a sermon from a few weeks ago, on "why a church is not a crowd." And I've been thinking...about what church has meant to me and what it will continue to mean to me in the weeks and months to come.

So there's the obvious - the importance of corporate worship and learning in the midst of fellowship with other believers. But I realize, for me, church means relationships - people who love you and take care of you and are there for you no matter what. People who shower you with glimpses of God's love in the moments and interactions you share with them.

My first churches were the campus churches my father pastored - in the midst of buzzing college campuses, places where I could go and eat donut holes and leftover communion bread, where my dad took me to sleep on the couch in his office when I was sick, where I met college students who would be my babysitters until the day I could be babysitters for their kids until today when now we are just friends, and it's hard to believe how "old" they once seemed to me. I learned later that one of the reasons my father loved campus ministry was because it lacked much of the politics one must deal with in a typical congregation, and because of the hope that those particularly hard to deal with people were only around for four years or so, instead of for a lifetime. By the time I learned this, it made good sense to me, but what I really carried away from it all was that in these churches of my youth, I felt loved and cared for and somehow special...and doesn't that just seem like something it should be?

When I returned home following college, my dad was at the height of his illness, and I began to see church in a bigger light - church became the family you needed when your burden was too great for your own family to carry alone. Church meant lasagnas and phone calls and random Christmas Carolers and soup in old ice cream pails and people who came to sit at your house just because that's what you needed them to do. I still don't know how we would have made it through that final year without the church, I really don't.

And following that most hard of years, I entered a church experience unlike any I'd ever experienced in my life, following my love and hence trading in the green hymnal and liturgical colored stoles for songs on big screens and long sermons and communion only once a month (still struggling to adapt to this one...). And in many ways, I'm still grappling with this change, but the thing that has carried me through is the dear people and friendships who have made this new church into a home...people who have loved us and cared for us and shown me that church is so much more than a building or a worship style or a link to some specific denomination - it's loving each other in the midst of doing life together, as Jesus first taught us how to love. It's making a family wherever you are.

Carl Rogers believed that we're all inherently good, and in our own way striving to reach our greatest potential as human beings. I know that the church (like any institution) has the power to bring out really nasty stuff in people (power trips, legalism, hypocrisy, you get the drift...), but in spite of that, I choose to be a little Rogerian - and believe that for the most part, a church is a group of really good intentioned people, trying the best they know how, to love each other in spite of living in a world swirling with mess and confusion. I know that I'm fortunate that's what my experience of the church has been, and I'm not really sure that I could (or would) ask for anything more.