two years later, part 1: why I love my church

Kat asked why I love my church. This is a question that deserves its own post.

After interviewing with so many churches and church plants, not to mention our tumultuous experience with the church in Birmingham, I'd grown cynical. I was tired of baring my soul, truthfully, and modern worship as a whole - its language and reliance on experience - was feeling contrived and silly to me. It is a precarious position for a worship leader's wife to find herself, especially when her husband is still looking for a job. Then we met Chuck, our pastor, who respected my aloofness and happily filled up my silence with his sincerity. Even though he reminds me of Ned Flanders, I have nothing but love and respect for the man, and I think he is a talented teacher. Most of all, I appreciate the depth of his sincerity - though our applications of the Scriptures are sometimes different, I have no doubt about Chuck's intimacy with God.

But Chuck isn't why I love my church. I love my church because of the way they love people.

Here's an example: there are three little girls who have been coming to my church recently. Just as I expected, our congregation immediately treated them as if they had grown up there, old women hugging their necks during the greeting, Sunday school teachers putting their artwork on the walls, parents picking them up to play with their children. They are foster children who have recently been taken from their home and put with a family in our church. In fact, their presence on Sunday morning has become so familiar to me that I did not realize until after church today that they had been moved from one family to another (both go to our church). I didn't know it because they were never the Adams' kids or the Whytes' kids - as soon as they walk in, they become Grace Community's kids.

One family has ten children living in their home; only three are theirs by birth. Another family, after raising their children, have adopted two little girls with Down syndrome. They are in the process of adopting two more. Another family has two foster babies that they are in the process of adopting. Chuck and his wife have eleven children (all by birth). We have approximately 130-150 active adults in our church, with an additional 50 children attending regularly (I have no idea how many are on roll). 50!

When I had the c-section, we were so inundated with food that we had to freeze much of it and are STILL eating leftover casseroles. When Brian was looking for full-time work, it was common for us to get checks in the mail. We weren't announcing that he didn't have a full-time job, and we certainly never asked for money. But word got around, as it always does, and the church responded, as they always do. One family bought Brian two suits when he got his job with the state. What's extraordinary is that this is common in our church - there were no announcements, no fanfare, just - help. My church is also multicultural, both in the leadership and in the congregation. There are no tokens, only people and families that are white, black, and Hispanic. There are also several interracial couples and biracial children. In Alabama, in particular, that's an unusual Sunday morning scene. It is also common to see people praying together before church starts or after it's over. Several families open their homes on holidays to single people or to those far from home. They vacation together, they raise one another's children, and still they are open and welcoming every week to newcomers. For all the hype in church plants about community, my church doesn't ever talk about it. They just live it out.

And this is what a church can do for my child, that I can't do alone. I can teach him Scripture, and I can talk about loving and serving people. But I can't show him how on my own. And I can't teach him love - he needs to experience that, in all of its forms. At home, of course, but also from friends and their parents and little old ladies and Sunday school teachers. I can tell him about church, but I'd rather not. I want him experience life, not just recite it. At my church, I am confident he will.