:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

When we lived in Connecticut, I created a new concept for my ride to church. With Christian music blaring, I called it worship pre-gaming.

I’ve only been to one pre-game party before a football. We basically ate a lot of cheeseburgers and got sick playing football while the adults drank a lot of beer and got sick. We all had an awesome time at the football game… sort of.

My lame experience aside, pre-gaming is supposed to get fans in the mindset for a game. Without laboring my point too much, I tried to pre-game before going to church, getting my mind in the right place. This wasn’t about showing up with my happy face in place. This was about rethinking the role of church.

I used to really stress about the details of a worship service—song choice, hand clapping, and whatever else I could nit-pick. By the time I returned to church after a seven year hiatus, I began to see the worship service as sacred space that could set the tone for the rest of my week. I let go of the form and zeroed in on the function.

So I’d crank up the volume, roll down the windows, and zip through the wilds of Mansfield and cautiously cruze through the UConn campus on my way to church with a few David Crowder songs pumping. I wanted to be in the zone, already praising God before I shuffled to my end seat in a middle row.

If I arrived early, even better. Humming my pre-game tunes, I’d jot down whatever came to mind, letting my mind roam in God’s presence.

Worship pre-gaming did not seal me off from my own stupidity, but it did help me to find new value in church and to take steps in the right direction.

I’m a bit of a workaholic. Being self-employed, it’s tempting to burn the candle on both ends, especially for one of my many book projects. Going to church throws me into an environment where I need to worship or else—as in, or else make myself miserable.

As I settled into my pre-game routine—I am nothing if not a creature of habit—I began to look forward to the worship songs, any time for quiet reflection, and then communion. God had a ready-made conduit to speak to me through his people and through the stillness of being in a church with my phone safely tucked away in the car and my computer languishing back at our apartment.

Those lessons about sacred space on Sunday transferred into my life at home. Healing started to happen in church. I started to find the life of God in community and in my own prayer time. I received prayer at small group.

Worshipping with Christian community reshaped each week, pointing me in new directions. We need to reclaim all of our time and space as sacred, but church is like a base camp that sends us off into our weeks on the right course.

Over all of my years immersed and banished from the church, I have boiled down everything that is important about Christian community to one, 4-letter word: LIFE.

Seek community where there is life. Where God is present and free to move. Where people are encouraged to pursue God’s calling for their lives. Where a community moves as one toward God’s throne of grace.

If you don’t feel the freedom of God’s life in a church, it will be hard to belong. It is God’s life that animates us and joins us together. We can find belonging through other means and activities, but it will never create the bonds God intended to create for his family.

I don’t’ want to offer a template or blueprint, but I do have one rule I follow: Look for the life of God around you.

Where is God free to convict you, to change lives, and to lead you? Cling to community where you can find that. Any community without the life of God is just a club, both an organization centered on common interests and a weapon that will, sooner or later, leave you broken.

Does gathering in community bring you closer to God and his life? Does community leave you more bound and trapped? That is my test.

God is doing stuff in us. We need to link up with the people who are also experiencing God in similar ways. Otherwise, we’ll only fight and struggle with each other. This is not to say we should avoid diversity. That can be good. However, if God is cultivating reverence and silence in you, then liturgy will be a healthy place to find community and to grow, rather than fighting through a more charismatic style that may leave you feeling confused and uncertain.

At this point in my journey, I feel like I’ve had teaching up to my ears. I feel so much more life in a church that emphasizes worship and prayer—as in actively praying for one another at the end of the service. There have been far more Sundays where I’ve longed to receive or offer prayer than to learn something.

I find God’s life in a community that reminds me I can’t learn my way into spiritual health or minister to others solely by imparting information. I suspect that the things that bring life to me today may shift or change a little over time, and that we all experience the life of God a little differently. Perhaps some of us need a little more instruction and knowledge to keep us grounded.

When I can sense the conviction of the Holy Spirit about sin in my life and seek out a friend who is waiting in the wings with the other prayer ministers, I know I’ve found a place where I can belong…

As my friend lays his hands on me and blesses me with confirmation of God’s forgiveness and healing, I can sense the unity of God’s Spirit, knitting us into one people, slowly becoming the image of Jesus in a broken world.

As our church in Connecticut sorted out its future, one of the church’s new leaders started to share her vision that children needed to become a higher priority in our community. As a church in a college town, it was easy to overlook the 5-6 kids who showed up each week. However, she was absolutely right. Part of our calling as a community was to support the spiritual growth of our children.

If we could not bond together for the sake of our children, were we any different from the dull disciples who tried to send the children away from Jesus?

The hard part here is that children’s ministry can become one of the many black holes that consume volunteers.

Churches abuse volunteers horribly.

Churches die without volunteer ministers.

If we want our communities to thrive, we need to participate in them, but then sometimes volunteering and serving takes on a life of its own where volunteers are expended as fuel for the sake of making the organization and programs thrive. On the one hand we need to invest in our kids, but on the other, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to create a “successful” children’s ministry that grinds up volunteers in the process.

This once again raises the question of whether we’re trying to help people thrive or whether we’re trying to help the organization thrive and survive.

Are we volunteering to serve one another or our community because it is good for others and ourselves, or are we volunteering because someone (sometimes it’s just us, sometimes it’s our leaders, sometimes it’s both) to help our organization become successful and well known?

When I visited one church, I happened to mention that I played guitar, and a couple immediately said, “Oh, you should play on our worship team. We need a male voice up there.”

Did you catch that? They were looking at a struggling program, and they needed fresh fuel to help it run better.

They didn’t ask me about where I was at with God. If they had, they would have found out that I’d been burned out terribly from music ministry. I’d grown weary of the complaining and the endless requests to meet someone else’s expectations and standards—the endless pushing and tugging for each person to get his/her own way.

I wanted no part of the music ministry at that point in my life. Truth be told, I was also clinging to my own way of doing church, pushing and tugging for dominance. There was one way to describe my volunteer relationship with the church back then: toxic for both of us.

The church and I were like a married couple desperately clinging to get our own ways because we feared that the other didn’t have our best interests in mind. The problem was that I’d been married to church organization, not the people.

As my friends began to dream about what our church could mean for the children among us, God showed me what he’d been hinting at all along: Christian community is not about the church serving me or me serving the organization. It’s about serving the people in our community.

I’d put up walls around myself in the church because I feared the organization would latch onto me and suck me dry like a relentless oil platform drilling down into my life until all of the fuel had been extracted.

My friend who asked us to rethink our approach to children’s ministry wasn’t concerned about making our church organization great. She simply saw a few kids who needed more attention from the adults, and she asked us to make sacrifices to ensure they’ll receive the support they need to follow Jesus.

When we sacrifice ourselves to an organization, we may get a mug, watch, or picnic. When we sacrifice ourselves on behalf of one another, we have a chance to see the life of God taking root and springing up among others. Serving one another brings more life, and that life can’t help but spread.

While attending our new, struggling church in Connecticut, we regularly faced the possibility of the church disbanding or at least going broke. Part of me hated the thought of finally finding a church and losing it.

I’d waited seven long years for this church. Would God really take it away from me now?

The more I thought and prayed about this, the more I realized that I didn’t care about this church. To put my thoughts more precisely, I was 100% loyal to the gathering of people, but I could live without the organization: the name, the logo, the meeting space, and the pens—I could manage never again seeing the 10,000 pens that a previous staff member had ordered.

On one hand, I was ready to give everything I had to this church. On the other hand, I was ready to start listing all of its assets on Craig’s List.

It was probably the best thing for me.

As I wrestled with my past disappointments with church and the hope our new community represented, the threat of losing it helped me keep a better perspective. I needed to belong to a community of people joined by God, not to a nonprofit organization.

When the people serve the organization and not God, one another, and the world, we create a barrier that may prevent us from belonging to God’s community. We become employees, of a sort, for an organization. This tension only becomes greater the larger a church becomes and the more assets it owns.

This taps into some of my issues I’m still working through with church.

On the one hand, I have no problem with investing in processes that help the community function better. For a season I helped update the church website and started an e-mail newsletter.

On the other hand, I have long resisted membership classes and any form of membership.

Perhaps my idealism lingers, but I still can’t stomach the thought of sitting in a class that explains the basic theology and practices I need in order to be a part of a community. What are the creeds for? I still imagine that the things discussed in these classes should be part of every Sunday and embodied at small group meetings and service projects.

If I need to be “taught” that my church values serving others, then what are we actually doing each week? Are we serving others?

The thought of formalized, hoop-jumping, class attending church membership still strikes me as a waste of time. I’m all for making a formal declaration that I’m committed to worshipping and serving with a group of people, but why do we need membership’s boundaries between insiders and outsiders?

The moment we create members and non-members, we’ve just created a potentially large barrier to belonging to a community. I know that the church has historically had a rigorous membership process, and I’m all for discipling and teaching new Christians, but I bristle against formalizing it and labeling people.

I’ve always tried to walk this line where I want to be fiercely committed to a community of believers where I belong while never adding anything that could put up a barrier between myself and anyone in my community.

Perhaps I’m an extremist here. I certainly don’t condemn anyone who believes in church membership or who has taken a membership class. I don’t want to make this a moral matter.

I just really, really don’t want to attend a ten week class that somehow magically makes me belong in a community. A class can’t do that.

The more I reflect on belonging to Christian community, the more I notice obstacles that we have created on our own. It’s hard enough to belong in a church. Why make it harder?

I know some churches that won’t allow people to serve in ministries without becoming a member, and that’s where I really bristle. Such a policy tells me that buying into the organization itself is more important than the ties that God has created among us through the work of his Son and the indwelling Spirit.

I could be wrong. I don’t know. I just know that the churches where “buying in” to the church’s way of doing things became a big obstacle. It wasn’t enough to profess the same creeds. I needed to profess the same vision statement and values.

That doesn’t strike me as a way to belong. That’s a way to become an employee. When an organization’s goals and values overshadow the work of God among us, belonging will be tough, if not impossible for many of us.

Jesus came to break down barriers, and therefore I’m always suspicious of any barrier we create before people can truly “belong” to our Christian communities.

Facing rejection as a church visitor is tough enough. However, if you don’t see the value of attending church in the first place, it’s nearly impossible to face something as unpleasant and alienating as being the lonely visitor standing with a cold cup of coffee in the lobby while everyone else cheerfully chats with one another.

When I stopped going to church, I didn’t see how I could ever make church work for me again. However, as I prayed about it, God sent a little nagging thought into the back of my mind: “Never say, never.”

I didn’t, but it was hard to believe.

My time isolated from Christian community was tough. As I struggled to find a new Christian community and faced the possibility of rejection or getting tangled in an unhealthy church, those seven years in the wilderness away from church reminded me what was at stake.

It’s really, really hard to be a Christian without the support of a community. For a few years we hosted a few Christian friends at our home for a morning prayer meeting before work, and that was a lifeline for me.

We only had about 30-45 minutes, but it was just enough to provide me a safe place to share my struggles and to find the support I needed so desperately.

Belonging to a Christian community is not about just stamping your time card each week and relieving your Christian guilt. In fact, the obligation of attending church is an empty mirage of Christianity. Attending church weekly is not a way of avoiding sin in and of itself.

Belonging to the life-giving Christian community, which can be found in church, is how we are sustained and kept healthy. We need to be with people who are facing the same challenges in life or who have worked through the same stuff as us.

We need to know we’re not the only crazy ones. We need to receive prayer from people who face the same doubts, fears, and temptations. Belonging to community is not always the same thing as “attending” a church.

We need to know that someone we care about will be crushed if we give in to our sinful desires. We need to know that someone will pray for our restoration after we have failed.

Failure in the Christian life is a very real possibility. Christians struggle with broken marriages, porn addictions, body image lies, eating disorders, and greed. These are big, ugly sins that have taken root in our lives, and our only hope of healing and wholeness comes through God and his community that embodies the ministry of Jesus.

If the church continues the work of Jesus among us, then we need to be connected to a community of believers who can bring his healing work among us.

When I am joined to a community of believers, I can find people who support me and pray for me. I have prayed healing prayers for others.

Isn’t it amazing that we all come together with our flaws and problems, but God chooses to use us to heal and bless one another. When we gather together in Christian community, we have an opportunity to be touched by the very hands of Jesus.

We don’t belong to a community when we all wear the same shirts or park outside the same building. We belong when we become the presence of Jesus to one another, joined together mystically by his Spirit as one body and bearing one another’s burdens.

Years ago, we used to attend a rural church. Naturally, the hunters ended up together.

When we moved to an urban setting, all of the cyclists shifted their chairs toward one another.

Sometimes these groups form naturally. Other times they arise because they’ve been imposed on us.

We’re frequently broken down into marketing segments by businesses for the sake of selling us products, and it’s not uncommon for churches to do the same. We naturally lean toward affinity groups and congregate around common points such as age, hobbies, beliefs, or even which service time we prefer.

Churches follow demographics, trends, traditions, prejudices, and just about any other way people define themselves. Sometimes these trends emerge naturally, while other times churches work hard to make these distinctions extremely stark.

With all of these ways to slice and dice people into groups, should we be surprised when it’s hard to find a church where we feel completely comfortable—where we feel like we fit in perfectly?

Whether we welcome affinity groups or we try to fight them through building generationally integrated small groups, there are real challenges to community and belonging.

When I tried to find Christian community again, I had no idea where to start. How could I find a place to belong? When I used to think about belonging in a community, I could only see:

• Our backgrounds are too diverse.
• Our experiences are too many.
• Our outlooks are too limited.
• Our wounds are too deep.
• Our commitments are too powerful.
• Our fears are too great.
• Our boundaries too many.

Three years after returning to church, I have a bit more perspective on that Sunday morning where we gave organized church another shot. It was so hard, so very hard to park our car, and walk into a building filled with the grins that every church visitor gets—grins that are rarely ever followed by an introduction or meaningful conversation.

I’d seen these grins at other churches we had visited during our seven year sojourn outside of a church. The lack of action that followed those grins told me: “We’re glad to see you, but please stay the hell away from our personal space.”

That’s what most church visitors see. That’s what I’ve seen too often as a church visitor. I’m sure I’ve given out those meaningless grins and handshakes to visitors more times than I can count. Once someone actually walked over and talked to us that first Sunday, I was finally able to face all of my baggage, that long list of bullet points that prevented me from belonging.

If you can survive the first visit, you face the daunting task of finding your place among hundreds or more people with a variety of interests. Where do you even begin?

This is an area where book publishing has helped me deal with rejection, failed conversations, and attempts at relationships that become dead ends. Sometimes you just can’t connect with people without facing the possibility of a limp handshake or a phony smile. My only hope over the years has been reaching out and remaining proactive.

I would have never found a place to belong without starting conversations, asking people about who else attends the church, and telling people what I care about. When a couple at our new church reached out to us, I was able to return the next Sunday and the Sunday after that, facing the possibility of rejection with renewed determination to overcome it and belong. However, I only had the courage to become proactive after someone reached to me and told me that I was welcome and valued.

I soon found people who read a lot, who garden, and value creativity. I had to seek these people out after services. I set up meetings at a café. I attended a small group. I volunteered for a ministry that connected with the passions God has given me.

The hard part about finding a community where you can meaningfully belong is that you need to begin with a flimsy handshake that means basically nothing. However, a handshake can be treated as a dead end or you can grab on to that person and learn about each other.

For years I made the mistake of assuming that all Christians viewed visitors as a threat to their neat and tidy social groups. That has been true in some cases, but as I’ve belonged to several churches, I’ve witnessed people who have really struggled to figure out ways to welcome visitors.

Those handshakes really can mean something. They aren’t necessarily a way of shooing me away after doing the bare minimum. Oftentimes, a handshake is a lifeline, welcoming me into a community. Everything changed when I took hold of that lifeline and held on for dear life.

Sometimes our worlds need to fall apart before we’re ready to let go of things we were never intended to have. For me, I had to let go of my control and idealism about church before I could belong to community again. For our new church in Connecticut, it was figuring out how to recover from the loss of its lead pastor to a scandal.

We were made for each other really—a messed up person trying to rediscover community in a messed up church trying to rediscover community. We were both asking the right questions—finally.

When I met with the teaching pastor, who had taken over for the resigned pastor, he bluntly told the truth about the church’s history. That’s one of the things I loved about this pastor and this church. There was no dressing up the story. He taught me so much in two years by virtue of his example.

Our pastor knew significant mistakes had been made, and part of the problem was the lack of oversight for this independent church. He needed to find accountability and guidance as he sought out the next step for this community.

Looking Back the Right Way…

Sometimes I think we look back in order to preserve something. We look back to a particular church or church model or Bible story or whatever ideal we have, and we try to replicate or preserve it. Then someone like me tries to use that ideal to control my current community.

Our pastor wasn’t doing that.

He pastor looked back to his history to get his bearings and to find our church’s identity? Who are we as a people? Why do we act in the ways we do? What drives our expectations?

He held loosely to any notion of the church’s current identity and focused on what the history of the church, both recent and ancient, had to teach him. That helped him ask better questions and seek better wisdom while praying about the direction of this struggling church.

Speaking for myself, I spent too many years trying to define my identity in the present, trying to forge a niche for myself. I mean, this emerging church thing that was so huge during the 2000-2010 timeframe was all about answering the question, “Who am I if I don’t fit into the church as I know it?”

My failure was an obsession with defining myself today and failing to understand what historical aspects of Christianity had shaped my identity. “Where are my problems coming from?” is a much better question than, “What don’t I like about church right now?” I asked too much of the latter and too little of the former.

Certain branches of theology proved quite flimsy and unhelpful to me. Certain styles of worship simply failed to connect with me. The more I looked at the diversity in the history of the church and the ways various Christian camps had impacted me, the more I began to see how I’d reacted to and been shaped by each.

I belonged so well in my new Connecticut church because it had a stronger emphasis on worship, prayer, and the Holy Spirit—in addition to the cultural issues I mentioned yesterday. There was Bible teaching, but based on where I came from, I knew that attending church, for me, was rarely ever about learning something.

It just wasn’t.

I desired to worship and meet with God. I wanted to receive prayer. I wanted to learn about my friends. I’d immersed myself in the best theology had to offer, and it just didn’t draw me near to God in the same way.

However, the most important thing I learned is that we’re all wired a little differently.

Teaching Me a Lesson About Worship

A friend of mine is just about the most practical, kind, and caring Christian you could ever meet. He also attends a church that basically preaches solid doctrine for 45-60 minutes. There are a few songs, but those are just a way to stretch some muscles before the main event.

My friend has never been happier. It’s exactly what he needs.

I visited one Sunday, and I just about fell out of my chair from a mix of boredom and despair. My friend smiled as he soaked it in.

After the service, someone asked me about the church I came from, and I described my church in Connecticut.

“Oh,” she replied. “Then this must have been hard to sit through.”

The grace and generosity of her reply startled me. Yes, it really was. I would have died before admitting it, but her kindness cut through my façade.

My friend’s church wasn’t a place where I could belong, but it was so incredibly perfect for him. I was free to not belong there. I could go back to my church in Connecticut without feeling guilty. In fact, for the first time in my life, I was genuinely happy about belonging in my church.

My guilt had been washed away because I saw for the first time that we all have different paths for approaching God’s throne of grace.

I should have known right away why the church we visited in Connecticut felt like a place I could belong. I just needed to compare it to every other church that felt like a round hole for me, the obviously square peg. However, the thought eluded me.

Rather than wondering why I felt like I belonged, I began to wonder why it didn’t repulse me.

For years I’d sat in services micro-analyzing everything. I’d grown so attached to my opinions on what the church should be and look like, that I found it hard to accept anything. I used to obsess over the ways everyone wanted me to meet with God, rather than just letting go.

Something had changed in me. God taught me to go to church and listen for him with his people. Sometimes he took me in a very different direction than the actual service. Sometimes I didn’t sing along to the songs that made no sense—like that one really popular song that mashes together a bunch of biblical ideas from the second coming to a revival in a way that I could never sort out.

I just closed my eyes and meditated on God as my savior rather than fighting the song. This was a small step for me.

I stopped trying to shape the church into my own image. I don’t know how I arrived at that point. Honestly, I think seven years outside of the church was the only cure for me. God had to strip all of my desires to control away from me.

While outside of the church I knew two things for sure:

1. I wanted to be in Christian community more than anything else.

2. I was a toxic threat to Christian community as I tried to let go of my preconceived notions for the church.

While God certainly changed me, there was something else that happened when I started going to that church in Connecticut: I found people who were asking the same questions and worshipping in ways that made more sense to me.

Just thinking superficially, our sanctuary felt more like a “cozy” café than the “bright, generic conference center feel” of the churches built by my parents’ generation. I put my cultural opinions in quotes there. It’s not like one is right or wrong. They both reflect the styles, habits, and values of cultures.

These values permeated everything from the questions people asked to the season of life for our friends. We were a church that consisted primarily of generations X and Y, and I had no idea how dramatically this impacted me until a friend pointed it out.

We certainly had some diversity of generations, but our church clearly reflected the values of my own generation. There was something so familiar and life-giving in discovering people who had the same struggles, questions, and ways of meeting God. They created the kind of sacred space that I longed for in my spirit.

I still don’t know what to think about all of this.

I don’t like the idea of letting one culture’s values shape our church culture so radically for each generation. What will my own kids think of a church shaped by Generation Y? It will no doubt appear to be extremely dull to them.

As I returned each Sunday and began to attend small group, I gave in to the allure of joining with my own tribe. I’d been in the wilderness for seven years. I couldn’t afford to hold myself to some kind of high standard where I waited for the perfect church that somehow transcended generational boundaries and provided the perfect mix of race, gender, and affluence.

Does such a church even exist?

Sometimes you need to just work within the limitations of our world, and even within limitations and flaws you can create something beautiful.

And besides, whether you attend a Roman Catholic Church or a staunchly fundamentalist Bible church, you’re experiencing a version of church from a particular time and place. It’s not like I’m doing anything different by attending my Generation X-Y church.

Our problems start when one church starts to declare it has tapped into the only biblical way to worship God. After my friend pointed this out to me, I realized that sitting in the round in a sanctuary graced by earth tones and a rocking worship band was tapping into the familiar.

For that season, I needed something familiar.

I needed to belong. I needed to know I wasn’t the only person like me trying to find God. It was the beginning of a long journey out of the wilderness. Sometimes you need to find your own people in order to figure out the path home.

I met with a friend the other day to talk about a writing and design project that I will soon unleash on you, but for now it’s a secret. In any case, my friend is a designer who grew up in the church, and he mentioned that our church is the first church where he actually feels like he belongs as an artist.

I’ve heard other artists share their struggles with the church in the past, and so I asked him, “What makes this church different?” I’m the new guy around here. What do I know?

He didn’t mention a program.

He didn’t talk about a curriculum.

He didn’t even talk about a small group.

“They just affirm who I am and my calling to create,” is the gist of his reply.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to belong in the church. We have men, women, artists, and plenty of other groups who feel like they just don’t belong in the church. After my conversation with him, I began to jot down some ideas. Here’s where I’m at with all of this:

What if the church is spending too much time trying to make us into something so that we can fulfill a greater organization goal?

In other words, I’m wondering if some churches have made a subtle but alienating shift into Church Inc®. Have we been asking people to offer their gifts to the church so that the organization can reach its full potential rather than affirming their gifts so they can reach their full potential?

In Church Inc® the people make the organization better, stronger. Artists can serve the church, but only when their gifts serve Church Inc® are they actually using their gifts to glorify God. Gifts are dropped in at Church Inc® and that’s that.

In “Church People,”the goal is to affirm people to develop their God-given gifts and to use them where they are. Church People tries to create focus so that people can hear from God, and sometimes those people will be called to serve God within the church. However, the difference comes with the function of the organization—there is a symbiotic relationship where the group and individuals serve one another rather than the advancement of the organization.

Church Inc® is a system. By and large, it has been adopted as “the way things are.” It can be equally cruel and demanding on pastors and attendees. Pastors are demanded to build something significant, and therefore they must use their people in order to build something they can feel good about.

Church People puts the people first, creating an organization that can only thrive when the people are loved and encouraged to pursue their God-given callings.

In writing about Church Inc® and Church People, I want to make it clear that I don’t see scheming people at Church Inc® who want to virtually enslave artists, coerce women, or browbeat men. However, this diagnosis could help us see part of the problem with people not fitting into church.

Men who desire adventure and challenge struggle with Church Inc® because it wants them to be nice, polite members, rather than affirming the challenges of Jesus in the Gospels to go out, serve others, to bring justice, and to lay down their lives for others.

Women who want to use their God-given gifts struggle with Church Inc® because it has limited places where they can serve, missing out on the ways that the Gospel abolishes the divisions of race and gender.

Artists who feel compelled to create struggle with Church Inc® because their gifts are only useful for the purposes of the church and its campaigns. They return to their daily work wondering how it could possibly relate to God.

In wrapping this up, I want to say that Church Inc® and Church People certainly can mix. I’m sure that a church that puts people first can easily cross the line into Church Inc® where people become tools for its goals. It’s easy to lose sight of these things.

I also want to emphasize that so much of church has been handed down to us. Generation after generation passes on church culture and customs. Who knows where Church Inc® came from?

There aren’t any sides in this matter. There’s only a state of mind, a state of mind that either puts the organization or the people first.

So long as we have organized churches, we will always feel that tension, that pull to put the greater organization ahead of the people. To the extent that we are committed to imperfectly loving our Christian communities, we will manage to fight off the wiles of Church Inc® and support the people around us because the mean the world to us—not because they are valuable assets for the future of the church.

There is one thing that I really, really dislike about moving.

It’s not finding cheap and reliable high speed internet. No, I spent two hours on that yesterday, and that’s still not the worst.

It’s not signing on to an electric company that literally pledges on their home page to fight EPA regulations.

It’s not finding a good co-op or farmer’s market.

We used shipping containers, so I don’t have to drive a truck to Columbus.

The part of moving that I really, really dislike is finding a new church.

It’s like crashing a party you haven’t been invited to. Sometimes you’ve dressed up when everyone else got the text about wearing flip flops and shorts. Sometimes you stick out like a red shirted communist at a Tea Party rally in your liberal Birkenstocks that cower before smartly polished leather shoes.

I’ve been on both sides of this. It’s natural to expect that a group of people will create a certain culture and group identity when they gather together. I think it’s natural to have a hard time breaking into such groups.

I still don’t like it.

However, the pay off is excellent. We visited exactly one church during our time in Connecticut, and after enduring two pretty horrible Sundays, we started meeting people, joined a small group, and developed some great friendships. As we grew in our church, I watched a bunch of people step forward to reach out to visitors. That gave me a lot of hope.

The hard part about visiting a church is that it forces you to consider what really matters most to you and what you’re willing to give up in order to be in a healthy community. One couple visited our church in Connecticut, and they left because we let women teach and don’t give an altar call each Sunday.

I scoffed at his closed-mindedness, but then I thought about our upcoming church hunt.

I really want to belong to a community that values the leadership and wisdom of women as God-intended equal partners with men.

I really don’t want to belong to a community that ends each service with drizzles of piano and an impassioned plea to flee the fires of hell and commit yourself to the Lord right this very moment because you are in danger of the fires of hell if you die tonight, yes, this very night… friend.

Hooray for Christian unity.

I’m both trusting God and nervous about this, which means I need to work on trusting God a bit more in this area.

All of this brings up questions for me about how the body of Christ works, where we draw our lines for unity, and the role of personalities and culture in our worship. I appreciate the diversity of traditions because in some ways they represent different ways of connecting with God. Simple church, contemporary music church, traditional church, and liturgical church all have their places.

Where will we end up? That is a question that I both want to avoid and desperately hope to answer.