The Church

Christmastime 2019

The world was a haze.

Though squeals of delight, little voices begging for my attention, and pitter-pattering footsteps were surrounding me, the sweetness of the sounds were muffled while the noise of the sounds pounded in my head. 

Until the noise was just too loud. 

In desperation and survival, I called my parents, and in a moment, one engulfed me in her compassionate arms, holding me while I crumbled and the other scooped up all three of my tiny toddlers in his great arms and carried them away. 

Her arms and his arms, just months before, had worked to resuscitate my sister and then held her body as they said goodbye. 

And now those arms held me and my daughters when I was at a breaking point. The arms that rocked me as an infant, the arms that cuddled me as a toddler, the arms that encompassed me throughout my adolescence, the arms that didn’t let go when my heart was broken, the arms that stayed open, waiting for me to realize the dangers of my abusive marriage, the arms that embraced me now. 

Then those arms tenderly laid me in a bed and told me to rest, to take as long as I needed and let my soul find respite.

And so I did. 

I slept.
My brother brought me food.
I washed my hair. 

And then I drove to my favorite place in Kansas City: The Plaza at Christmastime. 

I let silence be my companion. Aloneness was a friend. I smiled quiet smiles, but didn’t talk. I found comfort in the crisp air on my face while the beautiful Christmas displays ministered to my heart. 

And then I was ready to not be alone. I wasn’t ready to talk. I wasn’t quite ready to be seen. I just needed to not be alone anymore. 

So I went to church. 

In an old building, made modern with black window frames and held timeless by the white stone exterior and wide, receiving stairs, I found solace. The contrast of the warm light in the church to the cold darkness in the night seemed to pull me in. The gentle greetings, as if they knew I was fragile and needed to be handled with care, made me feel instantly at peace. I found my way up the stairs, into the sanctuary, and then I sat. Alone but surrounded. 

Surrounded by the people of God who didn’t know me or how my once soft and open heart had spent years building up a wall around itself to be protected from the weaponry constantly thrust at it in a marriage I had felt completely trapped in. They didn’t know that just months before my sister had died and a part of me and my dreams had died with her. They didn’t know that my world had been slowly fading until I was living in a world that oddly resembled the hazy black and white films I’d grown up loving so much. They didn’t know any of those things. But if someone was in that room watching me closely that night, then they’d know beyond a shadow of doubt that I love the Lord and I love his people. 

I don’t remember anything about that worship service. I can’t recall what songs we sang, what passage was preached on, or whether I grabbed the grape juice or the wine for communion. What I remember is the feeling of being joined with this church, whose stories I also didn’t know, and allowing their voices of praise to be a soothing balm to my aching soul. I remember being held by the peace-filled sanctuary and having the space to allow the Lord to hold me. No prophetic words were spoken to me that night. No one came up and asked to pray with me. I didn’t hear a profound epiphany and I wasn’t instantly healed from my depression. 

But I was held. 

The chorus of the saints and the preaching of the Gospel encouraged me to keep pressing onward.

The plan that Jesus had for His Church is wonderful. This! This tending to the weary heart; this support of the broken; this care for the wounded; this pulling in of the outcast; this loving the sick; this embracing the devastated… This was the plan. The Church would care for the members of its body - the people who now represented the body of Christ, doing the work that His hands and His feet did when he walked this earth. They would care for the members who were suffering, hurting, and lost. And then we’d learn to do what is good, pursue justice, correct the oppressor, defend the rights of the fatherless, and plead the widow’s cause. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, the Church would change the world. 

Those of us who have a church home, who regularly gather with fellow disciples, we sometimes forget the sanctity of being in a room full of other sinners with broken lives who have declared that they, too, need a Savior. Oftentimes I take for granted hearing the voices swell and fill the room when our praise is offered as a sweet incense to God. It is in the moments when I’m the weakest, when I feel I have nothing left to give to the Lord but perhaps the cracked voice coming out in a whisper, that I realize that sometimes, I don’t have to sing. I can let the Church do the singing for me and my soul can join along and offer all that it can. That night, that beautiful Christmastime night, that’s what happened in a church I don’t call my own, and a church building I haven’t been to since. I offered my black and white world and my cracked voice and my parched soul to the Lord and allowed these people, who I knew nothing about but have the greatest thing in common with, to lift up their voices for us. 

I was in a sanctuary where I was completely unknown but we all had common ground. We didn’t need to know anything about one another to worship our Redeemer. We all just knew that we needed one. 

Since then, I’ve seen the Lord’s redemption in my life. I’ve seen him make my black and white world colorful again. He took my cracked voice and parched soul and gave it life anew. He took my brokenness and has used it for His glory and good. My suffering wasn’t wasted. My brokenness wasn’t for nothing. 

And just like me, the Lord takes the Church, broken and messy as she may be, and He uses her for His glory and good. She’s flawed because she’s full of humans who, like me, have built walls and found themselves parched. She’s blemished because the image-bearers that form her, like myself, are prone to wander and are sinful. 

The Church is not perfect, but she is beautiful. 
And she is part of God’s plan. 

As I ponder this more I think about how oftentimes in the Bible we must distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive language, particularly in the Old Testament. There are many times throughout Scripture when an author is telling the story of something that happened because the story needs to be told, they describe details exactly as they occurred, even when the details are ugly and many times, not godly. And because these stories are found in the Bible, some people think that this means this is what God wanted, how He desired something to be, or His will, when in fact, it is just describing an extremely messy story so we can ultimately see that God uses all people, despite our sin. There are other times in Scripture when the author is sharing something that is prescriptive, describing how something ought to be. Descriptive focuses on what is while prescriptive focuses on what ought to be. 

The truth is, the Church has failed in so many ways. Sins have been hidden and covered up, leaders have fallen because of their own disqualifying actions, people have abused their leadership and God-given authority, and churches have been wrapped up in scandals that were the result of greed and manipulation. People in the Church have wounded fellow members in horrific ways. The Church has focused on minor things and outward appearances instead of people’s hearts. We’ve shown favoritism, we’ve cast aside the widows and the orphans, we’ve clenched our money tightly, and we’ve taught formulas instead of the Gospel. 

This was never God’s plan for the Church. This is simply describing what has occurred because she is full of broken image-bearers. 

But what ought to be? What was the prescriptive plan for the Church? 

Well, Jesus tells his eleven apostles in Matthew 28 to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.” Those eleven joined with the other disciples who had been following Jesus and His teachings and began doing just that. Even they were imperfect. We see where they bickered or spoke hastily along the way. But the Lord took these broken people and used them to begin spreading the Good News of Jesus! We see where a fire was carried and a flame was lit in cities all around! But the New Testament is full of letters written to these imperfect churches that were forming, reminding them of Jesus’ teachings and all He has commanded them. When the book of Acts begins, it tells us how the Church was formed and great miracles that occurred, and how God used sinful people and therefore, broken churches, for His glory and their good. The letters written to churches in the New Testament are full of describing what was happening in their churches then reminding what ought to be happening in their churches. We have these letters to use as references for ourselves now. But just because something is happening in the Church doesn’t mean it is what ought to be happening. Just because people who profess Christ behave a certain way, does not mean that is how Christ wants them to behave. 

Humans are not perfect, but they are beautiful. 
The Church, full of these imperfect humans, is not perfect, but she is beautiful. 

Because despite her flaws and imperfections and malfunctions, the Church is still full of wonderfully incredible people who are doing God’s work. People who are caring for orphans and widows, people who are devoting themselves to teaching and learning, who are living with open hands and hearts, who are welcoming the fatherless and caring for the needy, who are praising God and gathering together. The Church is full of sinners who are daily declaring that they are in need of a Savior. 

Let the redeemed saints sing over us, let them hold our arms high when we’re too weary to do it ourselves. Let the people of the Lord hold us close and care for our wounds when the pain is too much for us to do it alone. Let the Church welcome us in, despite our past or even present lives, and let them love us with the love of Christ, asking us to know His love without asking us to change. Let these fellow beloved people give us time and space for the Holy Spirit to do His work in our hearts as He has done in theirs.
And when we’re all together, when we’ve been redeemed and restored, let us sing in unison for the ones who cannot. Let us join arms to do the good work which God has commanded us to do. Let us also go and make disciples, care for the fatherless, seek justice, love mercy, and pour out our lives for the needy. 

We are not perfect. 
She is not perfect.
But goodness, she is beautiful.