The Good Ol' Days

I recently found myself speaking to an older church member on the years gone by. As he was reminiscing about “the good old days”, he spoke of how close communities used to be. The grocery store, general store, school, church and the local plumber were all your friends and neighbors. If you were short a few bucks one week, the grocery store would carry you to the next paycheck so that your children were fed. If your water pump went out on a Saturday night, the general store owner would open up his store so the plumber could get the parts that were needed to let you take a shower for church on Sunday morning. Neighbors meant more than just people who lived in close proximity—-neighbors were the people that you could depend on; family who you were not related to but would be in every major event in your life whether it was triumph or tragedy. As time has marched on, “progress” has changed the culture. Traveling has become easier, and the old general stores have given way to 24-hour super centers. The neighborhood plumber has given way to DIYs on YouTube, and if you're short for groceries, just put it on your Visa. I suppose it is progress…but along the way, I feel like we have lost something precious, not the goods and services, but the neighbors. Those lifelong friends that could laugh with you when your granddaughter took her first steps and cry with you when your grandma passed away.
The saddest casualty in this march of progress is not the general store but the church. As our communities have become decentralized, our community churches have lost their community. If we travel for groceries, why not travel for church? If we can travel for church so easily, then church hopping may be easier than finding common ground with a former friend who has offended your sensibilities. If you are frustrated, you may feel it is easier to just jump over to that church 30 miles down the road—-they have a better worship team anyway! But the casualty here is not really your church: it is your community. The local church is not about the building or the song leader…it is about the community that grows together in Christ, seeking to be ever-more made in his image. When Christ wrote the letter to the seven churches in Asia, (Revelation 1-3) he addressed the strengths and shortcomings of each church, and he told them of his sufficiency to meet their shortcomings. If half of the congregants from the church at Ephesus moved to the church in Philadelphia, it would completely change the nature of the Church body in that area and the remedy that would have been found in Christ. If you move from your local Church to the megachurch 30 miles away, you may get the services that you need, you may have a more charismatic worship leader and a rock star pastor…but you will not have the community that makes a church, your church. In the process, you rob your local church of the most precious resource that it has: you. Your church needs your input; it needs your gifts and callings. Your fellow church members need your care, your love and at times, your forgiveness for when they offend your sensibilities.
You need your Church community; you need the spiritual growth of working out those problems with love and care. We often hold church communities to an unrealistic standard; we tend to think that no one should have messy problems or hardships that spill over into our own lives. But the point of a church community is not to have a group of people without the hard things; it's about facing those hard things together. So put yourself out there, volunteer to teach Sunday school, or drive the church bus. Roll up your sleeves, and get involved. There will be laughter, but there will also be tears. The thing is that whether there's laughter or tears, you won't go through it alone and neither will we.
Because you will have us and we will have you—our church community.