If you go to church, or once attended a church and

don't anymore, or wish you could find one worth going to, this

column is a tremulous attempt at mutual communication.

Those of you who think the very subject is a waste of

your time check back later. Maybe life will have changed

your mind.

I'm cribbing from an elder's sermon notes, but the theme,

I think, runs deeply through most of us, whatever the name on

the front of the building we on occasion enter.

The issue is this: Why aren't we together even in our

own little groups and what can we do to get together?

Murray Bradfield raised the question Sunday, posing it as

a series of "opposing" pairs. Are we as Christians living more

on one side or the other; are we more oriented toward:

Meeting vs. doing (or being).

Duty vs. desire.

Artificial vs. genuine.

Isolation vs. companionship.

Segmentation vs. central feature.

Superficiality vs. communion (sharing significant life

together).

Individualism vs. collectivism.

Put another way, Murray asked, do I construe my

identity as individual or corporate?

Then he challenged the little group meeting at 11 a.m.

in what we call "our church," What do the leaders need to do

to make things better? And, bringing it home to each

pew-sitter, what can I do to make it better?

With apologies to Murray, I launch out on my own

here. Don't hold him responsible.

I firmly believe that God in his Word who is Jesus

has all the answers we need. But, seems to me, we

muddle through life for the most part never getting around to

asking the right questions.

You judge whether what follows might be some of

the "right" ones, based on your own experience. I'm

not claiming superior wisdom here; just a growing sense of need

for what seems to be missing.

Suppose your child is injured seriously in a wreck. Who

in your church will come and sit with you at the hospital

while you wait to see if she will live? Who will pray with you

there in the hallway, weep with you, be quiet with you,

touch you on the shoulder, or hold your hand?

At home, who will see to it that meals are provided,

chores attended, other kids cared for?

Look out across your congregation. Who among them

knows what kinds of hell you are going through? Who

would care care enough, that is, to spend time with you,

without trying to come up with all the answers?

And if you don't know many, how many do those strangers

on the other rows know themselves, in their hours of

desperation and loneliness? Could they count on you?

Jesus said (paraphrasing), Here's how the world will

know this is the real thing they'll see you loving each other, like

a family, no matter what the circumstances, no matter

your personal flaws.

With whom would you dare be honest? Who would dare

be honest with you? To whom could you possibly confess

all your sins? Jesus said, speak the truth in love and bear

one another's burdens. Encourage one another, forbear one

another, forgive one another.

Is that happening where you are?

Mostly our church groups are meeting-oriented, things we

do out of duty rather than a heartfelt desire. There is

mostly artifice and facade-maintaining, rather than genuineness.

We live isolated from one another, who are called

brothers and sisters. Church fellowship is more likely a

one-day-a-week thing, and the rest of the time, we do what we consider to

be the more important or pressing things jobs, kids to

soccer practice, tune up the pickup, tee time at 2, life.

Church-going is more an exercise in superficiality

each of us with our Sunday masks firmly anchored.

How are you? I'm fine. (Well, really, my oldest is on drugs, and

my spouse is spending more time away from me than with

me, and I don't know what the biopsy will tell about this

lump in my chest.) But, yeah, everything's just great.

Business is good. First hymn is on page 101. See you next Sunday.

(And don't ask me to serve on that committee. I'm too busy as

it is.)

We are American individualists, self-sufficient even if

it kills us. Who needs those other jerks?

Well, I do.

Granted, my life circumstances may skew my

perspective divorced, middle-aged, children grown and gone

to their own lives, empty house with pictures of the past on

the walls.

Am I really any more alone than you sometimes feel,

even in the midst of a crowd? Maybe we share some equally

isolated moments of lonely despair, but share them apart, unknown

to the other, Robinson Crusoes stranded on our own

individually constructed desert isles separated by vast seas of

mostly meaningless busy-ness.

That's what happens to individuals, I believe.

That's why our hearts cry out desperately for corporate

body-life identity, for connectedness to a family

my family, our family.

That's what Church is supposed to be a place of

family for those who are otherwise aliens in a strange land, cut

off from shared lives.

God sets the solitary in families, Proverbs says.

Jesus says, You are adopted into My family; you and I have the

same Father, and He loves both of us. My Church is to be the

expression of that adoption, of that eternal family bond. And

when the rest of the world those lost and lonely aliens

like yourself sees what you have been given, they will want it

for themselves. And it's available. You only have to ask.

There's not enough of that family life going on in most

of our churches right now. Seems to me, God would have

us experience more of His family life, together.

There's something happening in Fayette County these

days (and many other places as well). People from very

different church groups are getting together to respond to

something deep in their hearts the cry of family.

They are meeting in storefronts and church buildings

and each other's homes to pray that God break down the

walls between individuals and between individual churches

and individual denominations so that our family can

begin coming together.

Baptist and Assembly of God and Lutheran and Episcopal

and Catholic, black, brown, white and multi-colored folks

are meeting one another outside the old frameworks of division

and discovering that, with Jesus as Lord, we're all in this

together. We're all family under the one banner of Christ.

May we start behaving like we are kin to one another?

Law builds institutions and schedules dutiful

meetings. Grace breaks bread at the family supper table and

shares the joys and troubles of the day, together.

More than just about anything, I want to be a part

of more family suppers, where my brothers and sisters eat

and laugh and cry together, and our Father smiles with approval.

Don't you?

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