Category: Ministry

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Mental Health Ministry

Church Trauma, pt. 3

You can read part 1 of this three-part series here and part 2 here.

We left that church because we moved out of the area. We were disappointed that all the moderate Baptist churches were at least a half-hour away with none in our county at all. I went online when we were ready to visit churches and found two I wanted to visit. One’s website was down so I didn’t know what their worship times were, but the other church’s wasn’t. We decided to go to that church. We’d later join it. In one respect, we should’ve left long before we did. However, had we done so, we’d have missed out on getting to know some truly wonderful people.

The first preacher was toxic af. He was insecure for one, self-centered for another. I heard through people in our small group that his idea of “sermon preparation” was going into a small room near the worship stage (yes, it’s a stage) for the contemporary service and praying. No exposition, no diving into languages or contexts. As a result, his sermons usually had the following structure:

  • Read the scripture.
  • Spend fifteen to twenty minutes talking about himself and/or his family.

He and I had had a closed-door session with another minister present. At this time I’d been leading a Sunday school class of older women. Eric asked me what I did to prepare. I told him the study I put in then how I let the Spirit lead from there. He straight-up told me not to follow the Spirit when I teach the Bible. Do fuckin’ what???

I told him what had happened at the former church. Well, a few months later, Hubby and I had had it with the misogyny in our small group. Unbeknownst to me, he’d gotten up at five in the morning and shot out an email to that group addressing it. I didn’t know what in the world was going on until a friend of mine called me moments after my alarm went off to tell me how awesome it was. When we got to our class that morning, everyone was there, including the preacher. It was ugly and made uglier by the fact the preacher disclosed what I’d confided to him as a “gotcha” move.” My friend’s husband eloquently put him in his place. We left the class soon after (really should’ve left the church then), and there is only one couple from that class left at the church. It pretty much blew up.

We did eventually leave the church for a season, determining we’d return when he was gone. We had some good preachers. One we call “The Paul.” He’s still a friend of mine even though we’re both at different churches now. After he left this interim came on. After he’d been there a month of so, I was giving him the benefit of the doubt: He’s new. He’s getting used to us and we’re getting used to him. He’ll get better.” A year later, he wasn’t new anymore, and he wasn’t getting better. Truly a compassionate, kind man, but as a preacher he was either naturally ungifted and lousy or simply lazy.

We were so excited when our pastor search committee found a new preacher for us! That excitement was short-lived. I wonder what the committee members think of their choice now? He doesn’t vibe bad, but his words throw pink and red flags all over the place. He hadn’t been there two months when I felt the Spirit telling me to take my family to a new church. It was kinda a “Say what, sis?” moment. This new church isn’t Baptist. I’d been there once to walk its labyrinth, but that’s it, yet, God was leading. I was a little skeptical but excited, too. What sealed the deal was the preacher not-saying-but-saying something that made me picture myself standing between my older daughter and stones being thrown from the pulpit while others looked on. Except, my daughter was pictured as a rainbow sheep, and the stone-thrower and those giving tacit approval were white sheep. If you’re familiar with the works of David Hayward (@nakedpastor), you’ll know what I’m talking about. (Check him out on Threads, Facebook, and Instagram.)

That church is making a drastic shift to the right and is bleeding members like crazy. I learned today that the youth group that was sixty kids-strong when my older was in it is down to three.

So here we are. We’re at a new church. My younger daughter and I are ready to join. I think Hubby is a bit more reticent because he doesn’t adapt quite as quickly as we do. We all love our new church home, though, and Hubby said he wished our older daughter had had a place like this when she was younger. It’s very close to the church we wanted and had hoped our last church would become. The rector seems marvelously free of ego, and it has a beautiful, diverse body of believers. We’re becoming involved for the first time in twenty years. It’s taken us that long, that many years from the “if you build it, they will come” church to not fear being taken advantage of by volunteering to do things.

Have you ever been taken advantage of by a church? How did you handle that? Reply in the comments.

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Mental Health Ministry

Church Trauma, pt. 2

You can read part 1 of this three-part series here.

After Peter and I were married, our church was no longer “geographically desirable.” More like, the church was fine, but our apartment wasn’t; we’d had to move, though, for his job. The drive became untenable after a while and we looked for a new church. We happened upon a small country church. I’d grown up in one of those so this was good to me. I also wanted a smaller church so I could get to know people better. The primary dysfunction in this church was the pastor and his wife. The pastor did no spiritual self-care, and it’s customary for pastors to participate in small support groups with other local pastors. He didn’t even do that. He proclaimed, “My wife is my pastoral support person.” She’s a hospital chaplain to this day, and I’m quite sure after working forty hours a week doing spiritual care, the last thing she wanted to do was come home and do more.

There was so much funky about this situation. The preacher’s wife was pretty controlling. She took her role in the church way too seriously. (In Baptist churches, unless the husband and wife are called to co-pastor, the preacher’s wife just does whatever aligns with her gifts.) She was straight-up bossy and demanding. She tried to tell me what to do on numerous occasions, and I noped her.

At least a couple of times a month, there would be an announcement from the pulpit that someone in the community needed some work done on their home and asking for a crew to gather and go do the work that Sunday afternoon. I was working an unpaid internship forty hours a week (not including when I was on-call) plus a part-time job. Sunday was the one day I was guaranteed off, more likely than not. And here’s my newlywed husband happy to meet a need. That’s his thing, and I love him for it, but our marriage was starting to suffer for it. I told him, “The family was the first institution created by God, not the church.” He stopped volunteering as much.

The preacher felt like our church needed a family life center. It was supposed to attract students from the nearby university and families from the brand-new apartment complex across the street. My question of whether this facility would include showers so we could host unhoused people as part of that area’s Interfaith Hospitality Network was met with an emphatic “no.” After all, what could they contribute (financially) to the church? was the vibe I got. There was a suggestion of building a picnic shelter so we could host fundraising dinners to go towards building that family life center. To this day, that’s as far as they’ve gotten.

There were other indicators that we needed to move on. It just so happened that the conflict resolution person for our local Baptist association went to that church. Since she had knowledge of the local Baptist churches, she was able to recommend one to us. It was a good fit.

But there was toxicity here, too. I’m a cradle Baptist, and I grew up going to Sunday school. I was that one who read their lesson, took their Bible to church so she could follow along, and was thoughtful about my study. By the time we got to this church, I was in seminary. If I haven’t enjoyed Sunday school, it’s not because I didn’t want to, and I’m comfortable with participating in discussions. We weren’t there too long when the preacher told me that “some people” in our class complained to him that I talked too much. I guess the two men who alternated leading the class didn’t like an intelligent woman making them look inept, though that certainly wasn’t my intention at all. It speaks more to their insecurity than my knowledge.

anti-plagiarism picture
A male steals a female’s idea to claim as his own. Sadly, way too common.

Another time, the preacher and I were talking about our seminary experiences. He’d gone to a Southern Baptist seminary (pretty much the only pure Baptist seminary in our state at that time), and it just so happened that his preaching professor would later show up at my divinity school and become my preaching professor. Preaching isn’t my ministerial gift, nor is it at the heart of my ministry, but I enjoy doing it and can do it well. I just wouldn’t want to on a weekly basis. I was feeling a little proud of myself because I’d managed to squeak an A- out of my second preaching course. Our pastor told me he’d never gotten an A from that professor. I asked him if I could share the manuscript of my sermon with him. He said, “Yes.” Now, imagine my surprise a few Sundays later when I heard my sermon from the pulpit, almost word-for-word save a few illustrations, and with no credit given to the writer. Yep, our preacher plagiarized my sermon. I guess he liked it, huh?

If you’re a woman in business or ministry, when was a particularly painful time that a man stole your ideas or words and claimed them as his own? Post your response in the comments. (Note I’m not saying “if it happened,” because we know it does.)

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Devotional Thoughts Mental Health Ministry

Church Trauma Through the Generations, pt. 1

Among Christian, deconstruction, reconstruction, and progressive faith circles lately is this idea of church trauma. We often think of church trauma as being something big. Many people, for example, have experienced physical or sexual abuse at the hands of religious leaders, either ordained or lay leaders. A lot of women report being told not to talk about the abuse to “save the reputation of the man” who abused them. There are also numerous instances of people being emotionally and spiritually abused by the church and her representatives.

All this talk of church trauma has made me reflect back on my life and the mess I thought, believed, and experienced.

I was never physically or sexually abused at church at any time in my faith journey. But there was some trauma.

Broken churches, broken hearts, broken lives

My first church wasn’t horrible. The people were incredibly loving. It was a small, country Southern Baptist church. Let’s face it, though. In the 80s, pretty much all White Baptist churches in the South were Southern Baptist or Freewill Baptist and those that weren’t, we didn’t talk about.

Know what else we had in the 80s? Premillennial pretribulation dispensationalism cozied up with the RAPTURE. We had Jack Van Impe and his Barbie-doll wife (only Barbie looks more real, bless her heart) talking about the headlines and how they are fulfilling prophecy right in front of us!  We had David Jeremiah warning us about all the earthly things being satanic and leading people away from Jesus. We had songs like “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” that talked about how horrible things were since the antichrist ushered in the tribulation and how we needed to get ourselves ready and make sure everyone else was ready, too. Edgar Whisenant calculated that Jesus would return between September 11th and 13th in 1988–the fortieth anniversary of Israel becoming an independent nation–and when we were still here on the 14th, we got anxious (until it was publicized that Whisenant may have made a mistake in his calculations). Yet, we still read the passages where Jesus says no one knows the time and date, not even him, but only God. No one else (besides me, of course) questioned how this guy could be so sure of the date range for the Rapture when not even the Son of God himself had those deets. But we were taught not to question our leaders. Asking questions was an indication of not having enough faith. (Whisenant would go on to predict the return of Christ to happen in 1989, 1993, and 1994. Smart-ass me surmised one of those times that even if Jesus were planning on coming back one of those predicted dates, he’d intentionally stall just to prove this guy wrong.)

We were good, though. We’d said the magic words and been baptized and God was cool with us. I even participated in a play that one of our youth leaders wrote that, um, impressed upon people the importance of getting right with God. More like, it scared them into believing with the threat of hell. That play was popular; we went around to several area churches and performed it. (I was one of the girls who got sent to “everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.”)

Yet, over against all this “You’re a child of God” and “You have eternal life” were the very real messages of “You’re a sinner” and “If you stray off the path then maybe you don’t really have God in your heart (and hence, won’t get into Heaven).”

It’d only be a few years later that a new preacher would come in to the church and almost split it. This preacher made things uncomfortable for our family, especially my dad. (Guess he figured that Mom and I, being women, were not significant enough to mess with.) I was in college, anyway, so it was as good a time as any to separate myself from that church. After all, this new preacher was backed by the old diaconate who had known and presumably loved my dad and us for years.

I visited churches, some once, some for months, and everywhere in between. When I was in graduate school and was living full-time in my own apartment in the university town where I was studying, I became active about looking for and finding a new church home. It was a good one. My husband would later be baptized there, and we got married there. We’ve visited it a few times through the years.

After graduation and marriage, my husband’s job necessitated that we move away from that area. We made the drive for a couple of months or so. I’d been in the choir and had really enjoyed that, but with the commute, showing up for choir practice wasn’t practical. Eventually we realized we were too far away from church truly to be a part of the parish so we started looking for a new church.

Let’s converse! Do you remember or have you dealt with end times-related church trauma? What are you doing or have you done to heal from that trauma? Respond in the comments.

 

Categories
Mental Health Ministry

Getting in Touch With the Richness of my Emotional Life

Years ago I was training to be a chaplain. That’s a pastor who serves in secular settings, especially hospitals, the military, prisons, and hospice agencies. It’s a special kind of ministry, working with people in the midst of some life crisis, and the focus is less on a ministry of word (like you see with pulpit pastors) and more on a ministry of presence. We’re there. We’re present. Most of the time we listen. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we offer a shoulder. Sometimes we share Coke and pork rinds. It’s a more fluid ministry, one that allows chaplains to live into their own creativity and outside-the-boxness.

I was a resident, and my supervisor and I got along grudgingly. I’d like to say he was invested in my improvement, but it so often felt like all he was invested in was breaking me as a chaplain, finding fault in everything I did so I’d quit and give up the calling. I’m made of sterner stuff than that, though. One of his constant gripes about me was that I “wasn’t in touch with the richness of my emotional life.”

I was telling my therapist about this, the therapist who’s seen me crying and yelling, cussing and laughing. I told Jen about that supervisor telling me I wasn’t in touch with the richness of my emotional life, and she said, “What the hell does that even mean?”

It comes down to trust. Neither that supervisor nor that group felt like a safe place to share my emotions. It’s not that I didn’t have them. I also expressed them openly and passionately–just not there. I let my feelings loose at home with my husband.

There were also other trust issues. I had been taught from an early age that expressing my emotions publicly was “making a scene,” and this was vehemently discouraged. Even when my grandma died, I was shushed in the hospital corridor so as not to disturb other patients or make a scene. So expressing raw, naked emotions in front of people I didn’t really know or trust was simply not going to happen.

I’m happy to say to that former supervisor, “Up yours!” as I live fully into the richness of my emotional life. I’ve poured emotion out in my counseling journey. I used my feelings about having anxiety and how I’m managing it as the basis for my first book. And now, the emotion is coming out, sometimes in trickles, sometimes in floods, as I write about what it was like raising my firstborn and the pain she caused us.

So what does “living into the richness of my emotional life” look like? It looks like having the bandwidth to deal with emotions. It looks like daring to say the hard parts out loud. It feels good and liberating and relieving.

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Ministry

When “Mission” isn’t what we’re expecting

It was 2007 or 2008, and I was sitting across the desk from one of the OB/GYNs in the practice I was going to. I’d just had my annual pelvic exam, but really good gynos check out everything, probably knowing that women aren’t great about scheduling annual physicals. All was well “down there,” but the weight was another matter. The doctor said, “Your BMI is way too high [probably around 33 or 34 at the time]. You need to get down to 135 pounds.”

I looked at him and said, “That seems unhealthily skinny to me. I’d feel more comfortable at 150.”

Fast forward eight years to when I started trying to lose weight by tracking my food intake and walking–a lot. One of my goals at the time was to be able–physically fit enough–to be able to do mission work if called. I wanted my body in good enough shape to handle the possible rigors of being the hands and feet of Jesus. Then fast-forward to now. Today I hit 150 pounds, and I feel like I’ve got another ten to go.

I haven’t been called to the foreign mission field. I haven’t gone to Costa Rica or Haiti to help build homes from earthquake rubble or repair a church. I haven’t even been called to do local mission work through a non-profit or with one of a church’s ministry partners. But I have been called to serve.

About two months ago, my maternal aunt died, and my mom is the executor of the estate. She’s under a tight deadline to get everything done, and it’s a lot for her to handle, even with Dad’s help. Last week I told her I’d come up to help. I sat on the floor for about half an hour inventorying my aunt’s extensive CD collection. I climbed up and down off a step-stool cleaning out her kitchen cabinets. I hauled boxes out. I used that same step-stool to bring items in my aunt’s closet down to lower shelves to make it easier for my parents to get to them when they were ready. It was three solid hours of a great deal of movement. Thing is, I wouldn’t have been able to do these things nearly so easily had I not dropped so much extra weight.

And it’s not just a matter of dropping weight. I’ve been practicing yoga since spring 2018 which has given me the flexibility and balance to sit on the floor (and get up) and climb on step-stool. My weekly weight training–much as I hate doing it–enabled me to have the upper body strength to haul boxes loaded with canned goods. The mission work that I envisioned being in foreign and exotic places took place two hours away in a lovely house in autumn. And it was good.

Sometimes we miss seeing where God is putting us because it’s not where we were expecting to go. Mission work, though, is simply being the hands and feet of Jesus, or sometimes the ears and shoulders of Jesus as we move about in our day-to-day.

 

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Ministry Podcasts

The Nativity Scene

It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Much has gone on in the many months since my last post including the passing of the worst summer of our lives to date. It’s fall, almost winter. Advent is here! The tree is trimmed; the yard is decorated with many glowing, twinkling lights; and yours truly has started podcasting.

Today’s episode came to me during the night. Today my younger daughter and I put up the Nativity scene, and this week’s episode explains how this cherished, traditional bit of our family’s Christmas decorations represents the good news of hope for all people everywhere.

Take a listen here:

You can also catch the Ministering Wildly podcast on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeart Radio.

Categories
Mental Health Ministry

“How Can I Love You Through This?” What I’m really saying

My friends have heard me say many times, “How can I love you through this?” It’s an uncomfortable question to hear for some people. This can present another layer of weirdness when the friend I’m addressing happens to be of the opposite sex and may not be used to hearing that question. So many folks limit “love” to romantic or sexual feelings for another person.. In fact, I’ve grown into love being something I throw around quite often. I feel love for people in my life–family and friends–and I want to communicate that feeling to them. It seems I may have started something among even my fellow GenXers because “love” is flying around everywhere!

“How can I love you through this?” encompasses a whole lot of questions.

How can I support you through this?

How can I care for you through this?

How can I meet some of your physical or practical needs while you’re going through this? (Sometimes “love” comes in a casserole dish or shows up behind a mower.)

ultimately

How can I be Jesus for you as you’re going through this?

My Christian friends understand that that last question is the heart of it all. My nontheist friends haven’t met the same Jesus I’ve met so might not have been shown what Jesus’ love looks like. They know what my love looks like, though. (I try to get it as close to Jesus’ love as humanly possible.) Jesus embodied all the spiritual gifts; unfortunately, mine aren’t as far-reaching. But how cool would it be to be able to touch someone who’s sick, injured, or otherwise impaired and be able to heal them!

When I ask that question–“How can I love you through this?”–there are any number of correct answers. These may include (but aren’t limited to):

“Pray for/with me.”

“Can you mow my lawn for me?” (This is usually hidden as a statement like, “My lawn is really overgrown” or “The HOA sent me a letter about my lawn, but I just can’t summon up the energy to take care of it.”)

“I could use a meal I don’t have to cook.” (Again, may take the form of “I haven’t been grocery shopping” or “I’m nearly out of food.”)

“I don’t know right now.” This can be an invitation to sit in silence with someone and listen to them share their heart.

Sometimes, the unspoken answer tells us that the person just needs someone to be present in silence or to listen, and that’s okay, too.

So tell me… How can I love you today?

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Devotional Thoughts Ministry

Sowing Love

It’s love day. Valentine’s Day, 2022. We go all out, don’t we? We buy the cards, the flowers, the chocolates. Or, if you’re like a lot of the fellas I saw at the mall last night, you’re buying the jewelry and the chocolate chip cookie cake in sheer desperation. (Then there was the guy who I think was buying balloons, flowers, and chocolates for at least five different people.) Why do we save all the love-sharing for one day of the year?

I love how things come together. Yesterday in Bible study, we discussed Mark 4–the parable of the sower (or seeds, depending on how you want to look at it). Then this morning, this cartoon landed in my Instagram feed.

Jesus sowing love
This cartoon of Jesus as the sower sowing love gives me a new perspective on the parable. Art by David Hayward (@NakedPastor and nakedpastor.com).

As David writes:

The sower just throws seed everywhere. Some land here and some land there. He just throws it indiscriminately all over the field and beyond its borders and on all kinds of surfaces and in all kinds of places.

Some places are receptive. Some are not.
Some places are dangerous. Some are not.
Some are hostile. Some are not.

The lover doesn’t care.
The lover sows love everywhere.

I like this idea of sowing love much better than the typically evangelistic idea of spreading the word of God in order to “save souls” (never mentioned in the text).

Growing up around avid gardeners, I know a little bit about how seed is spread. When you garden, it’s different. You till the soil and create neat little rows. You go along behind and drop seeds or plant a seedling, gently and lovingly covering it up or patting the soil around it just so. Then you water it. Being married to a lawn care specialist gives me a different perspective. While the grasses where we live are usually sodded, grass where we used to live is broadcasted. When my husband broadcasted grass seed after preparing the lawn, seed could go pretty much anywhere. It certainly wasn’t unusual for some to land on the sidewalk or driveway, only to be swept or blown into the yard.

Whether you’re a gardener sowing seeds carefully or a lawn care specialist broadcasting seed with a spreader or by hand, you don’t quit or stop when things happen. Click here to go to Mark 4, and this is from The Message. If weeds invade the garden, the farmer doesn’t quit gardening. She doesn’t leave the food to rot, nor does she decide not to garden the following year. Same with the lawn care specialist. So what if some seeds land on the driveway where they’d never come up? He doesn’t quit because of that; he gets the seeds into the yard and goes on to the next account.

The majority of times this passage is studied and discussed, participants are challenged to think of themselves as either soil or seeds. If we’re soil then we have to choose if we’re hard and unrelenting, rocky, thorny, or good. Of course, we all want to be good soil. Or maybe we’re seeds. We’re seeds that never even take root or seeds that have a burst of life then die quickly. Or perhaps we are seeds that grow well enough but allow thorns [worries] to choke out our joy. We want to be the robust, fruitful seeds, and that’s what we hope to be.

But what about the sower? We don’t often think about him. We are called to sow the Word in this parable. Now, you might be thinking, how in the world do I get from “Word” to “love”? In John 1, we read, “the Word was God.” In I John 4, “God is love.” It’s basic math. If Word=God and God=love, then Word=love.

The sower, Jesus, sows love. Sometimes it lands on hard hearts. These hearts want this love, but just aren’t ready for it. The little persistent voice questions, “What makes you think you deserve this?” The person lets that love go because they don’t think they’re worthy.

Sometimes, the love lands on hearts that are softened and so ready. There’s that moment–and it lasts for a little while. The heart blooms under the warmth of this love, but then somehow it gets convinced that they’re not receiving the love the right way–maybe because of someone else’s religious doctrines–and it withers.

Still other times the love lands on hearts that receive it happily and gratefully. It’s thriving and growing, but then worries creep in. “Is this for real?” “How can he love me like this?” “How do I love him?” “But what about that time in college when…?” The plaguing of their minds and anxieties, doubts about their intrinsic self-worth, keeps the love from blooming to its fullest and makes it hard for the person to sow love themself.

Then the love can also fall on richly fertile, receptive hearts. This is love that takes root and grows. In the parable, Mark tells us that it yields an abundant harvest. That love blooms in our hearts, fills our souls, and pours out of us. It liberates us from all that has been holding us bondage and all that keeps us from loving God, others, and ourselves.

Then something incredible happens. We become sowers ourselves. Now it’s on us to follow the Jesus Way and sow love into the hearts of others. Sometimes the love will fall on hard hearts. Sometimes it’ll get an immediate positive reception then wither. Other times it’ll start growing in someone and their worries and anxieties will choke it out. Then still other times, it’ll land, take root, and grow, and another sower will join us. No matter where the love lands, all we’re supposed to do is broadcast that love everywhere to everyone, season after season.

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Devotional Thoughts Ministry

What Does it Mean to “Make Disciples”?

There are few phrases in church language that make me cringe, but “make disciples” is one of them. What does it mean to “make disciples”?

This idea of making disciples comes from the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20:

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (NIV)

But consider also this same passage from The Message:

“Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, marking them by baptism in the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you. I’ll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age.” (Emphasis mine.)

Many churchy people glom onto that “baptizing them” part and think, Making disciples means getting people into church so they can get baptized. Some people think it at least means getting people to come to church, to put their butts in the pews and their offerings in the plate. For many churches, numbers are important, supposedly indicators of how well the pastor is doing and how well the ministries of the church are functioning.

Making disciples has nothing to do with pew warming and getting dunked. Look at what Jesus says in The Message version. Making disciples means training people in the Jesus way of life and putting into practice all he’d commanded them. What does this mean? Short version, check out the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) and the parable of the sheep and the goals in Matthew 25. That’s what Jesus had taught them and commanded them–changing one’s attitude, loving and respecting others, loving our enemies (whoah!!!), and taking care of Jesus as he appears in the least of the outcasts of society.

That’s what Jesus had taught them over the course of three years. (The Greek root for “disciple” means “to teach.”) They were disciples; Jesus had made them disciples as he taught them day-in and day-out. Now he’s commissioned them–and us–to teach others what they’ve been taught, or more importantly, what they’ve learned. Jesus never told the disciples to go out and bring people into church; he told them to teach others his ways, and the way of Christ is radical, sacrificial love.

 

 

 

Categories
Devotional Thoughts Ministry

You are Welcome at the Table

You are welcome at the table of the Lord. Yes, you. And you. And you. Absolutely everyone in the world with open internet access (and a good translation app) can read this blog. That means I’m potentially addressing anyone in the world, and I’m including them all in the first sentence.

My tween and I weren’t feeling like getting up and dressed for church this morning, so we planned to stay home. No, it’s not that we were being slack; in fact, we attend small group Bible studies and worship pretty much every week. But there wasn’t really going to be a Bible study for her due to a retreat she opted not to go on, and our small group facilitator was out of town, so there was going to be something vital missing for us. Instead, we rested and then took advantage of being able to livestream the worship service of a church about two hours away.

For that hour, we were transfixed and transformed. In our living room, the two of us joining together with thirteen other parties online and many more in person, we worshipped. Responsive readings. Liturgies. Hymns. Spirituals. Prayers. We joyously participated in this worship. And we got convicted and uncomfortable. It’s the kind of discomfort that makes me want to DO something but has no idea where to start. I feel clumsy and fumbling in my efforts, and my OCD and hatred of that feeling–of not having it together before I start–can make me give up before I even begin. But I want to begin. As imperfect as my attempts may be, I pray that God blesses and refines the attempts to bring God’s love and justice to all I encounter.

Click play to listen to the powerful sermon. While it might not tick all the “proper sermon form” boxes, it was most definitely Spirit-breathed. (If you have time, go ahead and watch the whole service; it’s all inspiring.)

This service’s theme of being welcome to the table and there being ample room at the table reminded me of a pastor’s words of comfort and grace one Sunday service over a decade ago. When children misbehave, it is sometimes customary for their parents not to allow them to sit at the table for dinner, or maybe to dismiss them to their rooms from the dinner table. “Go to your room!” they command. Yet God never does this; God never dismisses us from the fellowship of the table. All are welcome. You are welcome. There’s plenty of room at the table, and I’m happy to dine with you.

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