Fall 2009 Pastor's Corner

“The Danger of Calling it a Meeting”

In my last letter (Summer 2009) I wrote of my growing concern for community and of our church's beginning steps to take and develop our sense of community. Since then we've moved ahead and launched what we call "Community Groups"— in an effort to provide time and space for relationships to flourish.

These Community Groups are geographically-based groups that gather on the 1st and 3rd Sundays of every month for a time of eating together, praying together, and reviewing and discussing together that morning’s sermon. Each group determines the order of those three basic elements, as well as where and at what time of day it will meet. But while each group discusses, "where will we meet," and "when will we meet," and "what will we do when we meet," we have to be careful to not get stuck on that verb, "meet" and turn this whole venture into one more "meeting." There is a danger in calling a Community Group gathering a "meeting."

We are to live with each other, in separate houses, but with intermingled lives. Closely enough connected that “as each part works properly, it makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”

Think of it like this: Suppose your family and my family are friends, and we invite you over Sunday after church. You accept and we finalize the plans. And then someone else invites you to do something else at that same time. You likely wouldn’t respond to this second invitation by saying, "We can’t, we have a meeting to go to after church." "Meeting" doesn’t seem like the right way to describe it. "We already have plans," "we’re busy," or even, "unfortunately, we have somewhere else we have to be"—any of those responses may fit. But what you have scheduled with us isn’t really a "meeting."

Sure, we’ve planned to “meet.” But the word “meeting” usually connotes a gathering for the sake of doing business. It has an agenda for which we are suspending our normal lives, and when the agenda is completed, we will separate and carry on. But when you go to a friend’s house for dinner, it is your normal life. And there isn’t an agenda to guide the conduct of business. Surely there is a plan—dinner, followed by clean up, maybe watch the game, or play a game or sit and talk over a cup of coffee. But that’s not business, that’s life. That’s what we’re targeting with Community Groups—life. Not business. Living together, rather than meeting together. Sure, there is a lot of semantic nuancing in what I’m saying, but that nuance is my point. There is a shift in paradigm between "going to a meeting after church" and "going to a friend’s house after church." That shift takes time—and it takes a commitment to the relationship, but eventually it happens.

And the reason that it must happen is because of what the nature of a church is. A church is a family—not a meeting, or a collection of meetings—even though we do have meetings (there’s those semantic nuances again). Jesus does not mean for us to be a bunch of people who set aside our normal lives to come together and do business, only to separate again, going back to our normal, personal, private lives. We are to live with each other, in separate houses, but with intermingled lives. Closely enough connected that "as each part works properly, it makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love." (Eph 4:16)

In Christ,

Steve Clark
Senior Pastor