Church?

    I've been spending a lot of my time this summer working at a ministry of FBC Abilene called City Light.  Its a sort of a combo soup kitchen/church/social ministry a la Mission Waco or Mission Arlington.  The ministry serves lunch three times a week, offers personal assistance for bills and gas, provides showers and laundry, and offers a worship service every Sunday morning.

    We are closed this week for yearly maintenance.  Once a year the whole operation shuts down for a week so carpets can be shampooed, ovens scraped clean, floors waxed, and pantries sorted.  It's a pretty massive endeavor.

    Yesterday as I was helping scrub down a serving station, one the directors began to tell me about something that happened earlier in the day.  A couple of the regulars  are lending a hand during the week with all of the maintenance.  She approached one of them to say thank you for helping out and his response was amazing.  He looked at her and said, "Why wouldn't I help?  This is my church."

"This is my church."

    Before that moment I hadn't really thought of City Light as a church.  After all, it is a ministry of another church, FBC Abilene, and I'm not sure that it does things like baptism or eucharist.  But when I heard that statement I realized that City Light most definitely is Church for these people even if it doesn't have a couple of the hallmarks we normally associate with a local congregation.

    In fact, City Light might be more Church than a lot of our churches.  This place meets the needs of its congregation in holistic ways.  It doesn't just provide a spiritual fix for them one day a week.  No, it offers them physical nourishment with meals throughout the week.  It gives them a place to clean up and helps them to make ends meet if they can't quite pay rent.  It gives them a ride to work when their gas tank is empty.  It provides a place of fellowship and solidarity with others that are having a rough time in life.  Because of this holistic vision of redemption and service, I honestly believe City Light is functioning more like the Church than many of our churches.

    What can I do back home to encourage this sort of holistic vision of salvation?  How can I allow my congregation to play this type of central role in my own life?

Sitting

    As I have been reading Introverts in the Church I have come to several great realizations.  The one that stands out the most concerns my proclivity for quiet times and reflection during worship.  I have always felt an inclination to sit down and reflect during times of song. One of my favorite things to do is to hunch over in the pew, close my eyes, and lose myself in my thoughts.  I've often felt really uncomfortable doing this, as if I'm being judged as less spiritual for not standing and singing with the rest of the congregation.  I've even had people tell me that the scriptures never mention sitting as a posture of worship so we should stand, kneel, or even fall on our faces.  But still, I find myself being drawn to sit.  There is something about sitting there thinking, praying and writing amongst my brothers and sisters that resonates with me, that makes me feel closer to God.

    Introverts in the Church helped me to realize that this inclination is simply a natural expression of introverted spirituality, which has a long tradition in the Church even if it isn't too popular in the contemporary evangelical world.  Throughout the centuries there have always been believers that connect with God through more contemplative practices than praise and worship choruses, hymns or even a sermon.  The community at Taize is a perfect example.  Three times a day they gather together to sit on the floor for times of meditative prayer, chanting, and silence.  And by silence, I don't mean a token 30 seconds at the beginning of a service.  I mean 10 or 15 minutes sitting together, not a single person uttering a word, only the sound of breathing filling up the room.

    Unfortunately for introverts like me, we live in a world saturated by noise and chatter.  Most of our churches tend to embrace this cultural bias towards extroversion.  Our worship is filled with noise from beginning to end.  We have songs and testimonies, sermons and readings, verbal prayers and even videos.  We enter the church in conversation about what we did last night and we leave discussing lunch plans and starting lineups.  There are hardly ever times of deep, honest, quiet reflection. 

    As a result I have tended to create the time for myself and often felt less spiritual for it.  I sit and think while other people are singing their hearts out.  I end up feeling like something is wrong with me, like my sort of spirituality is somehow defective because I'm not joining in with the crowd.  Not so anymore. 
   
    Reading Introverts in the Church and realizing that there are other people just like me (and more of them than we often think) that crave this type of introspective worship, has given me freedom to sit and reflect in worship.  Today when I felt the urge to reflect at the beginning of the service I sat down and wrote most of this blog post as an act of worship.  It is my hope that in the future more churches will integrate practices into their services that feel natural for introverts not just because we should make worship comfortable but because our God is just as much the God of silence as of song, and reflection as of exclamation.

Beginning

    I've tried to blog several times before but I've always quit after a couple months.  I would attempt to manufacture profound thoughts and spend hours crafting the perfect posts only to be completely exhausted by the time I was done.  After trying so hard I would always be tired of the whole process in a few short weeks.  Trying was always the death of my blogs.

    Now its time to take it up again.  This time I was able to work blogging into a syllabus for an assignment to give myself a little extra incentive.  Maybe if I have to write eventually it will develop as a natural rhythm of my life.  (That's at least my hope anyway.)  This time I also plan to try much less. 

    As we were driving to church this morning I was thinking about a book I'm reading right now called Introverts in the Church.  So far I have absolutely loved the book, not because it is the most profound book I've ever read, but because I have intimately connected with it.  It's almost as if he is writing my own thoughts for me, telling my story.  I started to think about other books in the past couple of years that I've loved like Evolving in Monkey Town and Questions to all Your Answers.  I loved both of those books, again, not because they were necessarily saying something groundbreaking but because I could relate to them.  They  gave me great encouragement, showing me that I am not alone in this journey.  There are other people just like me struggling to follow Jesus as best they can.  They struggle with doubts and cliches, with personality issues and questions.  Yet they keep going and they keep sharing their journey.

    This lead me to reflect upon my own writing.  Maybe I don't have to say something profound all the time.  Maybe I should just let my thoughts flow.  Maybe I should put my story out there so perhaps someone can recognize it as their own and be encouraged just like I was with Introverts, Evolving, and Questions.  Even when I don't have the best point to make, my thoughts could be exactly what someone else needs to make it through the day.  With that in mind, I begin.