Owning It: “I’m Not Letting You Change the Church I Love”

I almost called this post “When We Love Our Church So Much We Are Inadvertently Killing It.”

Every day of my life I hang out with people who love their church. ”Their church” is where they remember sitting in the pews as children. ”Their church” is where there are stained glass windows or pew cushions or baptismal fonts donated by their grandparents. ”Their church” is where they were baptized and married, where their parents’ and grandparents’ funerals were held. ”Their church” is about fond memories of Vacation Bible School and mission trips and choir.

Lent is just a week away and some of our congregations will gather for Ash Wednesday services where they might hear this traditional reading:

Isaiah 58:6-9 (The Message)
“This is the kind of fast day I’m after: to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation in the workplace,
free the oppressed, cancel debts. What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry,
inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families. Do this and the lights will turn on, and your lives will turn around at once. Your righteousness will pave your way. The God of glory will secure your passage. Then when you pray, God will answer.
You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’

The message (and The Message) are clear and yet – if we are honest – we just don’t want “our church” to be this kind of church.

There is a huge spiritual difference between identifying “my church” as

• The place of my ancestors and memories and power base and
• The community that serves together to break the chains of injustice, eliminate workplace exploitation, free the oppressed and cancel debts. The community that shares our food with the hungry, invites the homeless into our own homes, clothes the ill-clad and is always available to our own families in the name of Jesus.

Many of us (most of us?) just don’t want to that second part that Isaiah talks about.

Sometimes we have pastors who are on fire to step in and lead their congregations to be an Isaiah 58 congregation. But their congregations love “the church they’ve always been” and their pastors find themselves frustrated.

Sometimes we have church members who are on fire to shift their congregations from focusing on “getting new members” to being the kind of congregation described in Isaiah 58. But their pastors have no energy to learn how to lead that kind of church. And members leave in frustration.

Let’s get serious: what kind of church is “our church”? Many of you will say “we are both a church that treasures our tradition and reaches out into the community.” Maybe. But which is dominant?

The truth is that “our church” actually belongs to Jesus. How does “our church” look like Jesus and how does it not? This would be a good conversation to have during Lent.