Welcome to Church

Sometimes it seems like church is just a string of bad experiences. It can feel like all church ends up being is the alarm going off when you’d rather keep sleeping, sideways glances from people in the rows around you, and being reminded over and over that you should join a small group. Then, when you finally decide to take those steps and get involved, sometimes you end up feeling out of place and like you perhaps don’t fit quite as well there as you had hoped. After a while, or maybe after not long at all, you begin to wonder if this church thing is really worth it. All you see are people who claim to be Christians yet act very little like the Christ they profess to follow.

After all, Jesus didn’t call his followers to just try their best--he called them to be like him, which is a standard of perfection we’ll never attain in this lifetime. Over time, and with his help, we hopefully begin to look more like Him, but there is some truth to the fact that the church will always be filled with hypocrites. There is no such thing as a perfect church, because church is comprised of community, and community is built of people, and people are messy and broken and sometimes just not very nice. 

Yet I do think there’s something to this church thing. On Sunday Pastor Dirk reminded us to always look for the redemptive acts that God can accomplish, which I think can go for the people we work with who seem like scumbags, the person we pass on the street yelling out obscenities, and the people of any church you have ever stepped foot in. When God says everything can be redeemed, he means everything--even the church. 

The church and the people in it will never be perfect, but they are being redeemed. 

Perhaps it’s time to look at ourselves and the prejudices we may, even unknowingly, be holding against church and the people in it. While there’s no denying that real, deep hurt has been caused by the church, there is a time to let go of the anger, resentment, and pain, and begin to look for where redemption of those wounds may already be occurring or may someday. 

What does this mean for Encounter as a church though, and on a personal level, our everyday lives? Maybe we can be part of healing past wounds and helping people recognize the redemption written all over their lives, and maybe we can imagine how Encounter can be a community that welcomes people in, not just for a service, but for a lifetime. What things do we have in place that are already helping with that, and how are you or how could you be a part of it? Where are there areas we could do better in, and how do your gifts align with those needs? 

If we only look at the big picture, it seems an overwhelming task to try to make every person who steps foot in our church feel welcome enough to stay. For one person or even a small group of people, it is an impossible task, and because of our human brokenness, at some level we will always do it imperfectly. But it is an importnat task to welcome people in, and a reminder that all things are being redeemed. 

[Brianna DeWitt attends Encounter Church and lives, works, and writes in Grand Rapids, MI. Words are some of her favorite things, which is why her hobbies include reading, writing, and talking. She also shares on her personal blog at http://awritespot.wordpress.com and tweets @bwitt722.]