Blowin' in the Wind

We were all ready for Sunday morning to be “Denbigh unplugged.” Tropical Storm Ernesto blew through North Carolina and Virginia, dumping 9 inches of rain on our area and rearranging power lines to the point that we were in the dark from sometime early Friday morning until late Saturday night. So for basically two days we were without power (at home and church building), and those were the two days leading up to Sunday.

Now I’m not the most organized guy in the world, but I do like a little planning and preparation when it comes to Sunday morning. Unfortunately the sermon I finished writing late Thursday afternoon was still in my inoperable computer in my dark office. So Saturday I threw something together, had Roger pick some other songs (the old ones went with the sermon I couldn’t get to), and we prepared to do church in the dark with Coleman lanterns crammed in the family room. (Neither our auditorium not our family room have any windows, so “in the dark” is no exaggeration). We pulled the pin on Sunday School and got ready to do church like we did when without power for 8-9 days during Hurricane Isabel. But the power came on around 10:00 p.m. on Saturday night. Roger and I came in early enough on Sunday mroning (after saying that we wouldn’t) to have time to throw together a bulletin and PowerPoint slides for church. Worship probably came across much as usual... except the praise team got the week off and I probably used Greek works like “ahhh” and “ummm…” a whole lot more thn usual as I tried to think of something to say next.

There are a lot of things that we connect to church that seem like part of church. The list of these things could go on forever—church buildings, Sunday school, order of worship, four-part harmony, fellowship dinners, adult Bible classes, committees, Sunday night and mid-week services, full-time paid staff, pitch-pipes, communion trays, invitation songs, announcements, and PowerPoint slides (ask angelynn how often she remembers doing church without “singing off the wall”). What if you went to church where they had NONE of those things? Would you even feel like you had been to church?

Church is not about HOW we do things when we are together. Church is about worshipping and serving God, focusing on what God did through Jesus at the cross, and what God does in us through the Spirit that calls us to holiness and service. And it is about how we love and support one another as we focus on all those things together. The way that we do those things matters a lot more to us than they do to God. Sometimes maybe we need something to blow some of those tools-traditions-techniques around a bit so that we can more clearly focus on the heart of the matter.