After being closed since the start of the pandemic, my church opened for in-person worship in July. What a blessing this has been. For those who can attend in-person, we again experience the live, physical presence of fellowship and community with our neighbors. As one, we pray, confess and receive Communion, and together we dance and sing songs of praise to our Creator God. There is an immediacy with the preached Word and testimonies heard in real time.
I delight in hearing the babies and squirming children. The familiar colors of the worn sanctuary carpet are comforting to my eyes and the familiar hard wooden pews are strangely comforting as well. I’ve started the process of reconnecting with friends not seen in a long time and, while I recognize many faces behind masks, I’ve scanned without success for a number of people I was just getting to know last year when everything suddenly halted. The return to in-person activities will be slow for many of us as the risk of indoor gatherings continues, so online worship will continue. Young families need child care which is still rebooting, and in the last year and a half some people may have found other churches to attend. Other people have moved away or simply fallen out of the pattern of getting up early on Sunday morning. In our troubled world some people may be questioning what they still believe and whether Jesus has anything to offer.
For me, each Sunday morning of in-person worship is a blessing, with the diversity of God’s creation on full display. There are so many different people that I would not see during the rest of the week and people I would not see online. When I sign up each week and score a seat for the limited seating available for the coming Sunday, I feel like I’ve won the lottery. I sing to myself— “I get to go to church this Sunday” – and I get excited days in advance.
During the many months of online church, I frequently prayed for the day when we could once again meet in-person, join hands, and lift our voices together in worship to our Lord. And He has answered my prayer. We are concerned for the most vulnerable and tight protocols are in place – masks, no touching, distance, open doors and lots of moving air. We aren’t holding hands yet, but we are making progress and each Sunday everything works a little more smoothly.
Like small churches everywhere, most all of the worship leaders are volunteers, and when the pandemic hit, they revealed creativity, passion, and boundless energy to bring us remote worship each Sunday. Somewhere along the line, though, after the first couple months, I started to grow weary of online worship. Distracted by dwelling on how Sunday mornings used to be, I wanted everything to go back to what was in my comfort zone and what I was used to. Well, going back to the way things used to be does not happen in the real world, and the gospels are clear that Jesus is not interested in keeping me in my comfort zone. God did not create a static world, and He does not give us static, unchanging lives. God sent his revolutionary son to upset many tables in our lives. Thankfully the world and the lives He creates for us are endlessly dynamic with constant activity and change. And where there is change in the world and change in our lives, there are new opportunities to serve Jesus’ kingdom and love one another.
In his book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, N.T. Wright points out that when the New Testament speaks of God’s kingdom it is never as a distant place, separated from earth, somewhere out there in the cosmos. Rather, it always refers to God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, as Jesus himself taught us to pray. And we all have a role in performing the work for God’s new creation—His kingdom—here on earth.
In another book (which I also highly recommend), Wright writes:
“The church exists primarily for two closely correlated purposes: to worship God and to work for his kingdom in the world. ... The church also exists for a third purpose, which serves the other two: to encourage one another, to build one another up in faith, to pray with and for one another, to learn from one another and teach one another, and to set one another examples to follow, challenges to take up, and urgent tasks to perform. This is all part of what is known loosely as fellowship” (from Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense).
These workings of fellowship – mutual encouragement, building up, prayer, learning, teaching, setting examples, taking up challenges and working on important tasks – are like ways of tending plants in the garden that need the care and attention of many gardeners, so that the seeds and seedlings will root and take hold in the enriched soil of worship. Jesus’ Parable of the Sower tells us the importance of cultivating good soil in the gardens of our lives so we will bear fruit thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and a hundredfold. May the garden soil of our church community be rich and fruitful for the coming year, and may our worship practices on the sabbath, both in-person and online, encourage and promote the development of deep roots of fellowship. These fellowship roots will sustain us as our world continues to change and many of our comfort zones disappear, and they will guide our responses to challenge, uncertainty, and opportunity.
Father, we lift our churches up to you today and pray that you bring us fully back together for worship and renewed fellowship as soon as it is safe and possible. May fellowship in Your house flourish.
Jeff Bairey, an attorney, is the Chair of the New College Berkeley Board of Trustees.