Thursday, November 15, 2012

Doing Church

My parents moved to our town last summer. They wanted to be closer to my children, so they sold their house in Texas, bought a lovely old home in the nicest part of our seedy old neighborhood, and moved in last August.

My dad decided he wants my kids to see their grandpa attending church every Sunday. He is thinking ahead to the day when they only have memories of him, and he wants them to remember him praying and worshiping. So even though my dad is a retired Baptist minister, he and mom come every week to our congregation of Presbyterians.

It has been hard for my mom, who prefers churches where visitors are made to stand up during the service to get a big sticker so everyone can identify them as such. This makes her feel welcome. It would make me feel hunted, but then my mother and I are very different people. She wants a Sunday school class where everyone talks about their feelings; those classes make me itch. I like being in an introverted church where I can go weeks without anyone hugging me; my mother suspects introversion is a liberal plot to suppress the gospel.

So they come to church with us, but every now and then my mom skips out on "God's frozen people" and attends somewhere else. I remind myself that she misses her friends in Texas, and I try not to take it personally. But it started me thinking about how people choose their congregations, and how I ended up where I am.


When I first met my husband, he attended a small Presbyterian congregation in the neighborhood we lived in at the time. I asked him why he went to that particular church and he said something like, "Because Jesus wants me to love people, so I go where there are people who are hard to love." I blinked at that. Until that moment, I think I had always considered church the place where Christians go to receive comforts and encouragement, rather than the testing ground where they deliberately try to live out the faith. I thought of church as a place to rest, not the place to exercise.


Since then, I have come to see things his way. I have seen a lot of people - maybe most of my Christian friends - cast around for a congregation where they feel at home, a place where the style of worship suits their tastes and the political expressions match their own. They stay until some burr in their experience there gets too uncomfortable, and then they go somewhere else.  Sometimes the reasons are significant and understandable; sometimes they seem petty. But the search for a new church usually means a place where most people are the same age or the same social class. Homogeneity, we learned in Church Growth class in seminary, helps congregations grow.

One of my own biblical heroes is Tamar, who remained faithful despite years of mistreatment and betrayal from the house of Judah. She has been an example to me for many years of the scandalous faithfulness that God has for me. If I am to show that kind of faithfulness to others, sometimes it has to be hard. 

So I don't want to go to a church where most folks are like me, and everyone "shares the vision."  I don't want to go to a church where everyone is friendly, or even friendly in an introvert-acceptable way. I want a church with cranky old folks and lazy young folks. I want to be where there are stuffy curmudgeons who never crack a smile, and fragile weepers who consider my sarcasm a sin. When I sit down next to an eighty-year-old woman who is mad at the children for squirming as all children do (except for hers fifty years ago, supposedly), a woman who resents the shade of lipstick on the preacher's wife (or the preacher), a woman who firmly believes that she has not been listened to properly for the last thirty years and somehow it is your own personal fault and now she will explain why - when I sit next to that woman at fellowship hour and love her, then I know I have been in church.

Church isn't the place you go to find people who are always nice to you.  Church is not the place where you fit seamlessly, no scratches or pinches, like slipping into a favorite pair of jeans. It's not even the place where you can depend on everybody believing the things you do. Church is a community of people, brought there in the name of Christ (knowingly or not), each with their own flaws and sins and virtues. Church is the wheat and the weeds sown together, awaiting the harvest.

I show up with grace for the flaws of others, and lean hard on those who have grace for me. I bite my tongue sometimes, I remind myself to speak up others, and even (have mercy upon me, O Lord) accept the occasional hug.

And I hope, in that distant (please God) future when my children have only memories of me, they remember me going to church with kindness for the unkind, patience for the impatient, and love for the unlovely.

And if they don't, may they have the grace to forgive it.

14 comments:

  1. Brave you! :) Glad to find you again...

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  2. This reminds me of the CS Lewis quote about standing in a hallway and choosing what door to go through, not based on whether you like the paneling, but if you find truth and holiness there.

    Are you doing your Advent posts this year? (No pressure!) I love those.



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  3. Allysha, I'm mulling it over. I know it would help me get back into the swing of blogging, but it feels so burdensome when I'm doing them that I haven't worked my courage up to it yet. I still don't know.

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  4. I LOVE THIS POST. Having recently joined a new church after moving several states away from our home of over 25 years, these words hit home today :)

    Also, I think I will always think of you as Veronica... Who is this Sharon person???

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    1. HoG, this Sharon person is clearly a front for some nefarious scheme. I suggest you don't trust her. What kind of person uses a name someone else (her mother) gave her? A shamelessly inauthentic one, that's who.

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  5. There is such truth and beauty in your words (as always, Veronica...).

    BTW, I tried to "share" this post on facebook, but the text that comes up with the "share" is the first comment, not your actual post. I don't know if you can do anything to fix that...

    So very glad you are still blogging!

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    1. Linda, that happens every time I share a blog post too. Facebook is quirky.

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  6. This is something I've thought a lot about in recent years, especially during the two years we lived in Dallas and I was so unhappy in my church life, and just social life in general. My mantra at church was, "This is not about me. This is not about me," but I still left church every week depressed about the cultural norms and what an outsider I felt like. I was SO SO SO glad to leave for another city but in hindsight I do not think I did a very good job of loving the people there.

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    1. Julia, we have changed churches once in the last twenty years, so it's not as though we never do it either. I do want to be somewhere that my kids will hear the gospel preached. And I have learned that sometimes I need to withdraw into an introvert bubble and rest for a while or I'll burn out completely.

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  7. beautifully written. spoke to me and poked at me on many levels.

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  8. Yes, this is so lovely. We have bounced our way in and out of a few churches over the years. The places we ended up the least comfortable were the places where it seemed most important that we conform - and we laughed b/c as a married couple with kids it is far easier for us to "fit" at church than anyone single, widowed, divorced, kid free or anything. If we were squirming under the pressure, imagine what they must have felt.
    I don't think I always do share the vision or even beliefs with every single individual in our congregation. I am struck now as someone at a highly liturgical church that we are gathered for Eucharist. Receiving the sacrement is the central thing we do together - if you can call that doing anything at all.

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  9. I was raised Catholic so the idea that one could "cast around for a congregation" is completely foreign.

    I have only attended a non-Catholic church service once. I was newly married and accepted my in-laws invitation to attend mass at their Anglican church. It was a lovely morning except when my mother-in-law gave me the stink eye for saying, "So is Queen Elizabeth your pope?"

    Her photo was on the altar, this seemed like a legitimate question.

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    1. Nan, I thought as I was writing that this was one of those posts that would make little sense to my Catholic friends.

      We have neither the queen's nor the pope's picture anywhere in our church building. Depending on the day, however, we may have tartan flags and a haggis. I try not to think about it too much.

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  10. hah. came back to read it again-- this time out loud to J. knew I liked it, forgot how much :)

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