From June 28: Church Inside Out

Dear People of Christ Church,



This Sunday we have our first day of our combined service at 9:30 (instead of 8:30 and 10), and so we gather in the garden. We've had church in the garden on the Fourth of July weekend for the last two or three years, and it's always a nice way to spend some time in a sort of "essential church" mode-reading the Bible, eating bread and drinking wine, just being together. When I was in the Micah Project, the diocesan intern program, one of the places I worked was ecclesia ministries, home to common cathedral, outdoor church that meets for Eucharist on Boston Common. Many of the members are homeless, and many of those homeless are those who stay out on the streets rather, even, than find shelter space. The founder of the organization, Rev. Debbie Little, began walking the streets and meeting people where they were, offering socks and sandwiches and a listening ear. On Easter Day, 1996, they had their first service, and somewhere between Debbie wondering whether she'd do it again and everyone she saw on the street saying they'd see her the next Sunday, a new church was born.

Beginning to learn to minister in that context was amazing; I had a job in an "inside church," too, where there were also homeless members, so it wasn't so much the fact that people were homeless was such a difference between my two site placements. A lot was exactly the same-people learning to live in community with each other, amidst different understandings and hopes and fears and dreams. Being a church that met outside, though, you were forced to really internalize the idea that the church is the people of God, not a building. As much as we might "know" that church isn't a building, it's easy to act that way. Those four walls offer a certain shorthand for who we are and what we believe, but don't tell the whole story.


So, this Sunday, we'll be outside our own walls. It's unlikely to revolutionize anything, but hopefully it will be a moment of slowing down and looking inward, receiving the simple grace of blooming flowers and buzzing bees and simple music. At the same time, pray, too, for the institutional parts of our church; General Convention begins next week on July 5, so many people will be traveling between now than then to Indianapolis. I'll write more in this space next week about that-more news to come!



Blessings,



Sara+