Last week we had a series in chapel: Call to Wisdom, where different people in my office addressed different subjects. Now it wasn't only people in my office, we could partner up with other people, and that is what I did - partner up with a pastor friend. I took the why go to church and he took the how to choose a church aspect of our workshop- relevant to our audience of young people, many of whom will be settling into their own homes and choosing their own church, perhaps for the first time.
So, to the why go to church thing: I spent hours studying this, trying to discover what church was and what it should look like and why should we go.
The first thing I noticed is how like a family church is supposed to be. Just we have in our human family a father and siblings - brothers and sisters, so we do in our faith family. Just as we have distant relatives in our human family - people to whom we are related but whom we do not see because they live so far from us, we have relatives in our faith family, who live a great distance from us.
And just as we anticipate going home to our family because it is a place where we are loved, missed, and even needed in a variety of ways, we are to go home to our church family. God designed for us to function as a family. He is our Father; for most of my students, I am their big sister, and for some in my church, I am still a little sister. I need family, my faith family, as a place of safety, where I can love on people and be loved.
When you read the books of Romans through II Thessalonians, you are reading letters written to local churches, small local bodies; these letters meant to be passed around from family to family, bodies of believers then meeting in homes primarily. The writer was dealing with family issues, sometimes telling them how to resolve problems, and sometimes how to build better relationships.
We are in that same family, the larger family (Church universal) as our distant relatives were back two thousand years ago, and those instructions about family life are meant for us as well.
Just as family members love on, miss and need each other, so the local church family is to be that intertwined. Sometimes, we are the one giving the love and support and even admonishing, and sometimes we are on the recieving end of it all. Did you know that there are over 34 one another commands and at least nine "do not do to one another" commands? God means for us to be involved with each other, and the local body is the place for that to happen.
Now, just as there are many dysfunctional human families, after all we are marked by the fall, there are dysfunctional churches. But, we have not given up on the human family, we keep trying to get it right, so we must not give up on the faith family and the local church.
Instead of walking away, we must seek after that local family and be that local family where our brothers and sisters can find rest and safety.
As I near the end of this little piece, I must say that another blessing, and not the least because it is the last, is that in a local body, a local manifestation of the greater family, we get to see evidence of the reality of our Father at work. I stood in the back of church a week ago, not because I came in late....well, that's another story, but as I stood there looking over hundreds of heads, it occurred to me that they are evidence of the living Spirit of God at work. They are here in my faith family home because they are responding to God's call to come home, that they are loved, and needed and missed, that without them, this body has a hole.
Scripture tells us that we are members of the whole body. And though our roles in that body, like the arm or leg or eye differ one from another, each one is necessary to the healthy functioning of that body. So, I guess it all comes down to this, do I go to church for what I can get, like the visitor who comes invited as a guest to my house, or do I go to church because that is where I belong, as a family member? And just as family members work together to make the house a home, so should we in our church.
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