My Church Thanksgiving

Church has played a big part in my life. It has always offered me an anchor of community wherever I happened to be. Living at my 41st address, that's a big deal. Then there was the year I spoke in 50 churches over 50 weeks and found the very same open community at each one. I have always had a welcome reception waiting for me in whatever new place I have gone from before my earliest memories. As I look to what the future holds, I imagine that church will be different.

Gone are the days of “If you build it, they will come.” Gone are those times when church was the primary, if not the only social gathering place in the county. Gone is that period in which we could skate along with a sense that everyone felt that church was where they should be on Sundays and Wednesday nights, and then again for two or three other weekly events. The local church is no longer the accepted and expected social center for the larger community. Our society has built other options and opportunities for social outlets from school athletics to concert venues to clubs and theaters. The relevance the church enjoyed from being the only option in town has been drowned out amid all the other noise in which even the core parishioners we once counted on have become regular participants.

I’m thankful for the role the church played in my own upbringing and the rearing of my own children. I’m grateful for knowing that in whatever church I was speaking there was a supportive community offering a safe space for my children. There were the teenagers in Brazil who would claim our preschoolers at the first opportunity. When one would escape to join Daddy who was preaching up front, I could scoop them up and safely relinquish them to whichever parishioner stepped forward to reclaim them while I continued preaching. There were all the nurseries at which our eldest would stand in the doorway for a moment to discern the ground-rules before charging in full steam ahead, making new friends, and not wanting to leave when the day’s activities were over.

Granted, my experience with church is a bit different, as I have either been clergy or member of a clergy family. Granted, as the son of missionaries I had a certain status that preceded and followed me wherever I happened to be. Granted, I knew nothing different and thus expected to find a welcoming community anywhere people gathered in Jesus’ name. Granted, I knew no other venue where I could expect to find the same kind of belonging, especially given as how church and school mingled during much of my childhood and adolescence. Granted, extended family also kept church as their community center, often as not gathering with extended family at their houses of worship.

I guess that is the biggest problem in my history with and in the church. I have taken church for granted, as have many others. Where do funerals occur? At church, of course. Where are weddings held? At church, of course. Where are birthday, anniversary, and other life event celebrations held? Why, at church, of course! Well, at least they used to, but not so much today. Now there are other venues and a growing understanding that church is not the only community center that is available.

That’s the rub, isn’t it? We’ve been losing our captive audience, little by little. Kind of like the inverse story of the frog in the soup pot, our attractiveness to the community has been waning year over year, and we’ve too often failed to understand how we were competing for attention and lost our relevance due to misdirection. We focused so much attention on getting people our of hell and on a path to heaven that we missed the role we were supposed to play in leading people into living on earth in real community today.

As the church as a whole has been losing relevance, many similar voices have continued to escalate in violent reaction. They have focused a lot of emotional angst and anger at a society who has said in their actions, if not their words, that there is more to life than a constant preoccupation with sin, death, hell, and eternity. Jesus knew that. That’s why he focused so much of his teaching on how to live in community, a community in which there is an overflowing generosity of love to go around and encompass everyone and every aspect of their living.

The early church did not gather in formal sanctuaries with pews, stained glass windows, pulpit, lectern, altar, organ, paraments, offering plates, and hymnals. They gathered in homes, businesses, wells, watering holes, catacombs, or whatever other spaces they found available. They lived as a community far beyond the walls of any sanctuary or gathering place. They lived the gospel in their day-to-day goings on and encounters with one another.

Moving forward, I would expect that is more like what the church needs to rediscover and once again become. Moving forward, we need a return to community, but not a community focused on special buildings and structures dedicated to a focus on heaven in the by and by. I imagine the church will need to regain its focus and relevance though directing our attention to the concerns of living the way of Jesus in daily life while not neglecting eternity and our reliance upon God.

We will need to rediscover what it means to be the body of Christ in a way that the whole of our society might recognize Christ in our midst, even when we do not gather in any sanctuary at all. I will experience some grief in that transition. I have many good memories, many good experiences, many moments of joyous reflection related to those many sanctuaries where communities of believers have influenced my life. The challenge for me is to make sure that I can take those influences into all those other settings where we have not expected to be or find church. I imagine it is going to look a lot more like Jesus being accused of eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners.

— ©Copyright 2023, Christopher B. Harbin 

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