principium 101

There are a lot of people I know who have been fed up with the upstart or wannabe big church. One solution I've turned to in this context is to just go to a big church and see what it's like to be content with success and not always striving to fulfill an obsessive ambition to prove a worthiness for God's blessing on our endeavor.

What God has lead me to from that point is to attend a small, neighborhood church. We go to an old church with an old smell. The center pews are filled every Sunday with a substantial group of octogenarians. The building needs paint. The carpet needs burning. The pews are really cool, old pews.

What's surprising is that I'm becoming more excited about this church than I used to be about my upstart past; I'm less obsessive, thankfully, but excited. I wonder if God were to take all these angst-ridden, twenty-something, Christian kids and disbursed them among so many little churches all over the country.

One reason this is exciting is to see the gap between generations and families close around us: to have baby showers where great grandmas come sit next to teenagers and talk about their life and history; to have college students rock the band one Sunday and the middle-aged parents sing harmonies the next, to see God take the ordinary people, the ordinary places, and make a difference in the community. We don't have to worry about "changing the world", when we can have a homeless outreach Sunday afternoons and send missionaries to New Orleans in the summer.

Then we can go from there: global missions, church supporting as much as church planting, interdenominational expansion and financial support.