Why i still love the church

I have a real love/hate relationship with the church if I’m really honest. Having grown up as a vicar’s kid and now working for a Christian charity I have spent a lot of time in and amongst church, and I have seen both the good and bad. I have seen Christians hurt one another with critical words and judgemental attitudes, I have been hurt myself, and I am ashamed to say because of my own self-centredness I have hurt others. The church makes me both excited and angry in equal measure but the reason I love the church, the reason I am drawn back, even though I sometimes want to run away, is because I have seen what it can be at its best.

I love the church because it was the church who looked after two frightened and confused little girls when their mum became so unwell with bipolar disorder that she had to admitted into psychiatric hospital. It was people from our churches at the time who picked us up from school, fed us and generally looked after us. Others made time to listen to my dad, their vicar, as he came to terms with having to watch the woman he loved taken into hospital again. They supported him as tried to care for his wife, look after his two daughters and try and run a parish church. I love the church because it was the members of the same body of Christ who sat with my mum and offered hugs and hand squeezes of reassurance when, after she was well enough to come home, she finally felt strong enough to once again venture back into church. Years later, when my wonderfully brave mum died, very suddenly, without warning and leaving us utterly devastated, it was the church, different church communities but the same church, who prayed with us, wept with us and loved us through deep searing pain. They left meals on our doorsteps, washed and ironed our clothes, sent cards and letters and did countless other small acts of kindness, little demonstrations of love.

This is the church I love, this is the church at its best, a church that supports one another through life, helping one another through the pain and as well as celebrating the joys of life together.

Not everyone has had such experiences of church, for many church can feel hollow, promising community but delivering a joyful veneer that scratches the surface but doesn’t really go much deeper. I’ve experienced that too, a feeling of deep loneliness in a room full of people, people you worship with every Sunday and yet no one really knows you. That can be painful in itself and it can make you feel defective somehow as if you are not quite good enough, perhaps even just a bit too broken to be part of a church – that might not be true and it might not be how God sees it, but it can certainly feel that way sometimes.

Over the last couple of years in my job, I have spent quite a bit of time exploring with churches and community groups what it means to be welcoming, however more recently the conversations we’ve been having have moved from just exploring how to be more welcoming to thinking about belonging. A church, any community of people in fact, can be welcoming and people can have a good experience, but moving from welcomed visitor to a sense of belonging in a community is something much deeper.

In these conversations about belonging we have talked about the importance of people being able to participate if they want to and being encouraged to use their gifts and skills, we have talked about the calling of God through the Holy Spirit to a particular place or church community,but in these conversations we seem to spend a lot of time talking about the quality and depth of the relationships that are developed. Articulating a desire for reciprocal relationships that allow all involved to both give and receive as they are able, to create a culture in our churches where, as Dave Andrews puts it, “the private pain carried deep inside is allowed to surface and is shared in an atmosphere of mutual acceptance and respect”. This is the church I love, this is the church I have experienced and believe in, but, a bit like the kingdom of God, it is both now and not yet, it is a work in progress and one we are working on. But this is a church that many people long for, and given the epidemic of loneliness in this country, this is a church that so many people need.

I once described a church I used to be a member of as “an ordinary bunch of big hearted people muddling through life together”, and for me that is what church is, when it’s at its best. It’s not the quality of the sung worship, the numbers of people who attend, or a great church leader, that make it for me. Whether the church meets in a beautiful grade two listed building, a school hall or in someone’s home, it doesn’t really matter. It’s the genuineness of the people and their ability and willingness to be open, honest and vulnerable with one another; sharing the love of God and their journey of faith together. That’s a church I want to be part of, a church that actively seeks to love God and love one another. When the church does this and actively pursues it, it is a community that people want to belong to, because in truth, no one has life sorted, we are all muddling through life in one way or another, and what the church offers is a community to muddle through life with.