What do we want to be known for?
It is hard not to be moved by this article from Kimberli that did the rounds on social media recently. I don’t know Kimberli, but the story of her husband’s premature death is heartbreaking, and the struggle to find Jesus in the midst of that heartbreak deeply touching.
Up to now, I haven’t had to deal with a close family member dying in this way, let alone my wife or one of my children. So my own experience of trying to find Jesus amidst the struggles of life — and death — fall into relative insignificance compared with Kimberli’s.
Yet it is probably true that when we face heartbreak, pain, loss, grief, relationship breakdown or suffering of any nature, what it means to be church comes sharply into focus.
In Psalm 48, Mount Zion, the dwelling place of Yahweh was known as the joy of the whole earth, as a fortress. The New Testament Church, the dwelling place of God, takes on that mantle. We, the people of God, His dwelling place on Earth, are the joy of the whole Earth, the fortress for all the people of the Earth.
Church is a fortress — a safe place — where the broken find a welcome, where the widows find a family, where the lonely find friendship, where the suffering find solidarity, where the lost find new purpose, where the weary find strength.
Church is a place where the people of the earth find joy — not always a feeling or experience or exuberance (although it can mean that) — but, as Dallas Willard puts it, the “pervasive, constant, and unending sense of well-being” that that the people of the Earth will find through the presence of Jesus that defines the Church and the love of the people that make up His Church.
Church is the place that people know love in it’s truest, most powerful, beauty through the people of the Church. In fact Jesus says that the people of the earth will ultimately be known as followers of Him because of our love.
So for me the question that stories like Kimberly’s raise for us is this. What, ultimately, do we want to be known for?
One of my friends used to lead a church in a relatively broken neigbourhood in a large city. He recounts the story of a few people coming into his church from another Church across the city that was known for its high-level production. These few people came and sat in his church in the back row and wept there way through the service. It turned out that these people were on the production staff of the other church. The pressures of having to repetitively deliver an experience in their church had crushed them. Yet in the relative simplicity of my friend’s church with a very different set of production values, they experienced the presence of Jesus, and the love of His people. And they wept.
I can’t comment fully on everything that Kimberli experienced in her moment of despair. And I don’t know everything about those churches in the city. But I know that I have, from time to time, been in places where the professionalism of presentation, the pursuit of good production, form or even ‘relevance’ has come at the expense of love.
Sometimes it comes at the expense of love for the staff of the church. Sometimes it comes at the expense of love for the people in the church or in the community. And yes, I too have been guilty of that.
So the real question — at least for me — isn’t whether we have coffee bars or not. Although for me, having a warm, welcoming, safe space to sit down and talk and share and pray and drink coffee creates community, builds relationships and in my experience (at the risk of sounding dramatic) can even be an expression of love that brings grieving and distressed people back from the brink. I’d quite like to be known for that.
And let’s face it. I’m a worship leader. My whole life revolves around coffee.
No, the real question for me is this: What do we want to be known for?
This surely drives everything we do. And everything we don’t.
