Thinking About Church

In church today, while we were singing one of the songs, I suddenly had a flashback to my time in Thailand two years ago, and a night when I attended a worship service among Thai Christians who were jumping up and down as they sang loud praises to God, in a room with no walls. They sang in Thai, but I knew some of the songs in English, and though I knew little of any of the people around me, I felt a unity with them that made me smile.

There was a simple beauty in that moment, in that place, that I have let myself forget in the intervening time, growing disillusioned as I have with myself, my faith, and my God. I was glad for the reminder today.

I don't know why I go to church sometimes. But after remembering that moment in Thailand, I thought that maybe part of it is because I can look around and see the antidote to my pride, my arrogance, my critical judgmentalism. What is that antidote? It is...other people. Ah, they can be the poison, too, I don't deny it. But I believe in grace--ah, grace, the undeserved favor of a God who loves people regardless of whether they always love him back. And I cannot believe in grace as an abstract theory, but as a vital reality working itself out in people's lives. And so the antidote, the cure, is in knowing that if God can work miracles in me (and I pray that he does), he must be working them in the people around me--even the ones I see in church! And none of them are perfect yet, and lots of them might annoy, bore, or anger me, but perhaps I do the same to them. God knows what he forgives me for, every single day.

It's true that I still do not like "church," the formal, programmed routine with its endless join-the-club type activities that takes up Sunday mornings and various weeknights in buildings across the country, and around the world. But I don't believe that God hates it. I believe he is sorry about it, but he is able, as I rarely am, to look past the program, the imperfections, the posturings, the studied piety, and see individual hearts that are broken, weary, and struggling to be good and love him--just like mine.

I would do better to remember that more often, than to recite the critiques and grievances that are so often nothing more than the litany of my spiteful arrogance.

I am glad that God is love.