This Christian Life

Sweet Comfort in Church

Our family visited a church other than our own last night. We went to visit old friends who were in town and this was our chance to visit with them. It was the first time we had gone to another church in a while.

The first comment I want to make is that it was good medicine to be at a different church and experience worship with different leaders, styles, smells, things to look at and ways of doing things. It was good because it was in contrast to what we usually experience. Too often I think we get so bogged down in the minute details that we lose the forest for the trees and forget what it’s all about. We get wrapped up in church politics and forget to love our brothers and sisters. We want to be on top, and sometimes think so poorly of our church mates that we don’t ever give them the benefit of the doubt and create a snowball of bad emotions and feelings.

And, something strange happened last night that I wasn’t expecting. As we were sitting in this, what I would call a much more “traditional” church (high walls, pews, smoked glass, expensive details, bored congregants…), I found myself defensive. I always get defensive when I go to a church like that because I think I’m going to have to deal with a lot of baggage that I don’t like to deal with.

But I was pleasantly surprised. I started to feel comfortable—GOOD comfort. Like I was home. Like I didn’t have to fight. Like I knew what to expect. Like I could feel that the arrows were all pointing in one direction and I could align myself quickly so that we could all move in the right direction together and be in the Spirit more deeply.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. said,

“We must face the sad fact that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing “In Christ there is no East or West,” we stand in the most segregated hour of America.”

Not that I’m not against diversity and integration, but there is a lesson learned here, don’t you think?