I was surprised that I wanted to go to church. I was in the middle of a six-week renewal leave from local church ministry and had purposefully avoided anything to do with church the first few weeks. I ended up in a small church in a small town on a high mountain of Colorado. I had been invited by a friend who couldn’t go with me. When I walked into the sanctuary almost half way through the worship service the entire congregation turned to look at me – all seventeen of them. There was the guy with unwashed, shoulder length hair who had his own oxygen tank. The woman in mismatched shoes. The family with the two children who ran around the edges of the sanctuary. The boy, about 10, pulled his arms into his sleeves and fluttered his hands like wings while he made wet motor sounds with his lips. I wanted someone to sit on him. There was one woman who looked like someone who could be my friend. “What an island of misfit toys,” I thought.
And then something happened. The prayer of confession’s words were familiar, “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and what we left undone…” The difference was that in this church we knelt to pray. We knelt on the floor. We knelt on the worn carpet and muttered our prayers together, “We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” Tears pricked my eyes. They weren’t tears of guilt or shame. The prayer of confession became a moment of unexpected grace. Something snuck in.
And then the pastor sat on a pew facing the congregation and led us in a conversation about the scripture passage, Jesus’ story about a man whose harvest was so plentiful he decided to tear down his barn and build a bigger one but dies that night. The conversation touched on the congregation’s successful badgering of a local supermarket chain to provide food for the free community meals that they host several times a week. Among these folks, many of whom looked like at one time or another they had trouble paying their rent, or an electricity bill or buying groceries, I thought about how my own anxiety about money traps me. And how it traps my church. I thought of how we want to be the “cool kids.” And in that moment I wanted to be one of the misfit toys.
As I worshipped with this strange little congregation I let down my defenses. This congregation couldn’t worry about slick church growth strategies or programs attractive to young couples with attractive children and baby boomers with money to give. One day they may not be able to fix the roof or pay their pastor. But for now they’ll follow Jesus in their little church in their little mountain town. And my heart was strangely warmed.
Very touching Melissa. Thank you.
Ermaloi
Thanks, Ermalou!
Melissa
Thanks for the reminder of the what the business of the church is when it’s not just a business (to paraphrase Frederick Buechner).
Thanks, Bill. It’s so easy to forget!
Melissa
This really touched a nerve with me, as I often feel more connected in church when I’m back in the small towns of my youth than in the huge parish I attend in the city. It’s impersonal on some level and the marketing is a necessary evil, I guess. But simplicity is more appealing and somehow more real to me.
Laurel, and I suspect you need to be connected in the city. It’s so easy for the church to get distracted by what doesn’t really matter or serve.
Melissa
The raw honesty in this post makes it very real. Thanks for sharing it.
Thanks, Erin. I think you would have loved that church, too.
Melissa