I wouldn’t have picked the church if I had written the story. It was far too conservative, a little too rigid for what my family was about to go through. But we ended up there by accident, mostly. My father landed there with us when I was still young. He got tired of the church, as he usually did after a few weeks, and decided to move on, but this time my mother stayed. It became our church home for some of the toughest years of our lives together.
If I wrote a novel, I could not invent better characters than the people of this church: the studious pastor; the proper old lady who did everything just right; the operatic singer who, I thought, stopped just short of causing the stained glass to shatter when she hit the high notes. The church had everything: a full cast of characters any novelist could transform into a gripping story just by putting them in the same room together.
I learned Jesus there. I also learned about Greek tenses from the pastor, a regular feature of his sermons. I learned how to love the Bible from Mr. Taylor, my Sunday school teacher who somehow graduated to the next grade as we did. I learned about evangelism from the lady who lived downtown, who could never spend more than 30 seconds on the phone, but who opened her house each year to squirmy children for a bible club for local kids. I grew from a toddler to a child to teen to a man at this church. It marked me for life.
It wasn’t the perfect church. I don’t mean this in the generic “no church is perfect” sense. I can identify particular fault lines that ran through it, perhaps an inevitable result of the mix of people present. It certainly isn’t the church I would have chosen for myself. But God knew better. It was the church my family needed. It was the church I needed, the pastor I needed, and one of the most gracious provisions of God to my family. I thank God for this church.
It isn’t the church I would have chosen for myself. But God knew better.
I used to scratch my head when I read Ephesians 3:10: that “through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” God shows his wisdom through the church? Really? Through pastors who try their best but never quite preach the sermon they’d hoped to preach; through collections of personalities who mess it up as often as they get it right; through ordinary, flawed, quirky churches like the ones I know?
Yes. Just as a skilled carpenter can take driftwood and create a beautiful piece of furniture, God takes us, puts us together as part of his people, indwells us with his Spirit, and somehow creates something beautiful, something that embodies his presence and his power.
I no longer think that church is about the skill of the pastor, the strategy of the elders, or about getting the right people on or off the bus, as important as some of those things may be. It’s about God indwelling an imperfect group of people, creating something beautiful out of nothing, something that pulses with his life.
I would never have chosen the church where I grew up, but God did, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
