Many people have their qualms about church. And for good reason. Those reasons lie anywhere between the weird rules impressed upon people from church to judgmentalness to legalism to not belonging to all sorts of other things. I don’t know how many other places are capable of hurting a person so badly or healing a person more fully than church is, but they must be few. Since church is a place people go to seek mercy, forgiveness, and love, to face their problems and to try to get better at this weird, sticky thing called life, church has an unparalleled magnitude of responsibility to anyone who comes.
And church is not a building.
I was on my first trip (of many) with a campus ministry at my school. We attended multiple conferences with numerous sermons discussing the gospel and love and Jesus each day. But I remember very few things about those sermons beyond that.
What I do remember was one night when all the boys in their rented-out-filled-with-little-food-supplies-as-well-as-knowledge-of-how-to-cook condo prepared a meal for all the girls. A team of guys had never slaved over a hot stove for me before and the whole experience made me feel very loved. I don’t even particularly remember what we ate. I just know they went to the effort of making second runs to go get gluten free food that would sit well with my sensitive stomach.
That dinner was the first church service I felt like I had been to in a long time.
Sometimes church has nothing to do with walls or windows, pulpits or preachers, but everything to do with everyday people saying, “Welcome! Let me fix you some gluten free food and make you not hungry for once. Sit! This is a place to talk freely about real things and not put on a show. So here, here is your gluten free food prepared by hand and with love, though I’m not actually sure how good our cooking is. Eat and have your fill and don’t worry about looking fat or stupid or getting sauce on your shirt. Hey, we’ve got sauce up to our elbows and we’re still going. No judgement here.”
Church isn’t even necessarily about church. It is about Jesus. Church is weird because its employees work 24/7 and most of the time, have no idea what they’re doing. Church is where people covered with spaghetti sauce welcome people who have never tasted spaghetti, or worse, had spaghetti thrown at them before. It is where Jesus’ love is most fully shown by people who need this love themselves as much as anyone else. It is a place where spaghetti is doled out as much as it is eaten.
For anyone who wants to try some spaghetti and not feel judged when it falls in their lap, I hope it is comforting to know there are still cooks out there willing to fill you up.
And if you have put down your ladle, it’s never too late to pick it back up and get dirty again. So come to church! Look for someone with a stained apron and a bowl of spaghetti on standby.
Church may very well have nothing to do with a building or preaching at all. Church may be anything that resembles gluten free food served by people who are just as hungry as you.
Look for the people who know they are a mess and yet continue to serve spaghetti; that's where you'll find "church."
