Entry #7

This series was originally published on my socials in 2021. My beliefs and opinions have changed in some ways since then, but these words are still meaningful and relevant to who I am and what I believe today.

“The church isn’t a building.”

If that ain’t a tired phrase.

And yet.

I also keep hearing, "You're attacking the church. There’s already enough division. What we need now is more unity, less opposition." Phrases like “the Body of Christ” serve as reminders that poking holes in the institutional church is attacking Christ himself.

But to me, it seems like no matter how often we say, "Church is not a building," we still equate “showing up to said building on Sunday morning at 10 am, singing songs, and listening to a sermon” as being THE Body of Christ.

But I see the Body of Christ differently.

The tattoo artist whose several-hours-long sessions result in long conversations about finding redemption and grace in the midst of great pain and struggle without any stench of pride.

That tattoo shop is church.

The hair dresser who washes and trims and dries and lovingly holds space for the woman who would never step foot inside a religious building but craves to be touched, longs for someone to listen, desperately needs community.

That salon is church.

The teacher who shows up to her classroom while it’s still dark outside and walks slowly around her classroom, touching each chair, asking the Holy Spirit to come down, praying that the way she serves them and cares for them today would show them something about God’s great love for them.

That classroom is church.

The family who opens their home every week to college students, feeding them a home-cooked meal and promising to be a surrogate mom or dad for the next few years.

That home is church.

The group of moms who meet at a restaurant on a Tuesday night for just a few hours of peace and quiet and cry to each other and for each other, who confide in each other that they’re worried that maybe they are terrible moms, who gently remind each other what’s true and what is a lie from the pits of Hell.

That restaurant is church.

To me, the Body of Christ is just a group of individuals who believe in Jesus and meets together to encourage and pray and remind each other what is true. No matter where that is.

SIDENOTE: *I can’t include a disclaimer for every single statement I’m about to make because I don’t want this to be 9,000 words. I know the critiques and observations ahead aren’t true of every church or every Christian. I hope you can read without hearing accusation, but instead hear me sincerely asking, "How can we do this better so that more people feel welcome and more people experience the freedom of Christ Jesus." *

Reading through Acts, sometimes I wonder if God looks down at the way we do church and thinks, “Love you guys buuuut that’s not really what I had in mind.”

Assigning one person to study and know the Bible, to take on the responsibility of regurgitating all the information back to passive members sitting in rows?

Congregations so large you can slip in and slip out without ever so much as shaking another person’s hand—Anonymous Church seems like an oxymoron.

Parents arriving to church in inner-city neighborhoods, locking their cars and avoiding eye contact with unsavory characters and dropping their kids off to practice rote scripture memorization for cheap prizes about “taking care of the poor among you”?

Reaching out to the “unchurched” without ever getting to know them or their stories? Inviting them to church on Sunday before ever inviting them into our homes, not seeing that a person might be terrified at the idea of walking into a church building but our dinner tables might be the precise place they see Jesus clearly.

Families scrambling to get ready on time, arguing and yelling, flying past the homeless man on the corner and the car broken down on the side of the highway so they won’t be late, teenagers rolling their eyes in the backseat because they are catching onto the hypocrisy, even if just a little bit.

And the thing is, these things are talked about in the church. Pastors see it and preach against it. It’s not like we’re all saying, “Welp, that’s just what church is. Sorry ‘bout it.”

We don’t want these things to be true.

We create programs and ministries to try to make them untrue.

But the system is set up in such a way that makes true community HARD.

Because we’ve moved so much, we’ve had to start over at a new church eight times in the last ten years.

This past decade, I've been forced to experience the discomfort of being an outsider over and over again.

Even though I’d grown up in church my whole life, even though my dad was a minister and an elder, even though church felt like a second home and I’ve never been hurt or traumatized by a church family, even though I FIT IN in that setting, it has been so hard to feel like I belonged.

To know people's deepest parts, their hardest stories? There just isn't time.

Vulnerably living life together with a group of people who really know you, your gifts and struggles—no matter how wonderfully welcoming a church family is, that is a tricky peak to reach. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but in our modern, busy culture, it takes years.

It’s not enough to say from the pulpit, “We don’t want this church to be a place we all smile and pretend.”

If the system is working against genuine community, we have to change the way it looks.

And this is the part where I offer a solution. Except that I don’t have one. Is this behavior inherent? Can we change it? I don’t even know.

Maybe church looks as simple as investing time and energy and relationships with your actual neighbors? Meeting at each other’s houses once a week to talk about struggles? Eating meals together and babysitting each other's kids?

In “Searching for Sunday,” Rachel Held Evans talks about how communion in the earliest church was actually a full meal together. Sitting down around a table and breaking bread and talking about life and the beauty of Christ’s story, informal but reverent.

It made me think about all the times I’ve had “church” at a dinner table.

I'm starting to see the beauty in all the ways Christians operate as the Body of Christ outside of the literal church building.

The Body of Christ isn't just a group that meets on Sunday mornings in an auditorium. I know we say it all the time but—church isn't a building. FOR REAL.