Welcome, Visitor!

This past week, Nick and I received a “Welcome, Visitor, to our church” letter in the mail, signed by the pastor.  However, the letter came from the church we’ve been regularly attending for five years.  Whoops!  I understand what likely happened… the week before we had put Ada in nursery for the first time, and needed to fill out a card with her and our information, a card that likely is also usually filled out by first time guests to the church.

And perhaps this is a sign of our involvement in our church, that our names didn’t arouse any vague memory of familiarity to those on staff?  Yikes, that is a sad wake-up call if that is the case.  My guess is that this is just a thing that happens in large churches.  But of course it got me thinking.

I really like the people in my church… all those that I have met.  Some of them follow this blog, and if that is you…. I like you and am glad we go to church together!

But I totally struggle with a lot of aspects of going to my church… or maybe it is a struggle with going to a large church.  (Large is of course all relative.  I used to call it large, with an attendance somewhere around 1000-1200, and now it is likely closer to 3000.  That’s large to me.)  I easily spend a good five minutes during church trying to figure out how they get the lighting and backdrops to work…. Oooh, that’s shiny and pretty!  Another five or ten minutes are involved with me working through my frustration of the snazzy worship team singing about how God makes beautiFUL things out of us – least favorite song ever, sung at least every other week.

So I struggle with my attitude, wondering if it is just an attitude, or something more.  In talking with one of my good friends recently, I began to consider that perhaps my angst at church and big church is something that a whole lot of folks in our generation are also dealing with.  I am thirty.  I grew up with flannel boards, apple juice and animal crackers, while singing such gems as “Oh, you can’t get to heaven… on roller skates…” and other less Biblically sound kid songs.  I was a sheep in “Baa Baa Bethlehem”, and went on to write my own scripts to a couple plays that we also performed for our church in the jr. high, complete with bathrobes and straw hats for costumes.  Hmm…  Then in high school I played piano for “As the Deer”, and we had car washes to raise funds for mission trips.  I liked church, and I got church.  It was never a question of whether I would go to youth group or not.  And I know that our church didn’t have it all together, and there were heaps of issues.  Any time you have a group of people doing life together, there will be some amount of conflict.  But my point is that we did do a fair amount of life together.

This year our church sent invites to a special dessert (yay, food!), where we could come and see what God was going to be doing at our church – as in, how He was going to commission us to build a multi-million dollar wing onto our new building to accommodate the recent growth.  Well, the money didn’t all come in, and the church is in the process of figuring out what to do now.

I get it.  Our church is big and is busting out of its britches, and this Sunday our daughter couldn’t be in the nursery, because there wasn’t room.  But can’t we just say that?  We need more room, and we’re going to get a lot of money and build it?  Do we have to bring God into it, saying that HE is doing something big?  As in, big like our new children’s wing is going to be?  Because I don’t know… I don’t know that we can say that God wants for our church to be big and to have a really nice, super attractive facility, so that rich people will feel comfortable hanging out there.

The question I pose to myself, but also to all of you is this…. Is there a point where a church’s spending on, say, a building, becomes immoral? Or unethical? Or not pleasing to the One for whom it is being built?   I can trust my church elders that they know what needs to be done, and that they are being very careful and responsible with spending, but even after that is said, do you think that there is ever a point where you could say that God would not be pleased with the amount of money spent on the actual facility that His people meet in?  For me, I could hear that an addition costs $800,000 or $8 Million, or $8 Billion (!) and they all look like really big numbers.  So I’m not the one to be able to make any sort of assessment on what amount of money is reasonable to spend on an addition, and what amount of money would be decadent or unnecessary.

And this is what disturbs me.  Because I live in an area where the socioeconomic status is … higher than from whence I came?  Can I say that?  And there is nothing wrong with that… and many, many in my community have started to come to our church and hear about Jesus, which is obviously a great thing.  I think that many of them have come from other churches, however.  Smaller churches, perhaps.  Less snazzy churches, maybe. 

In the meantime, I realize that it isn’t just about a building campaign to me.  Churches get bigger and need more space.  I think most will agree that they would not think it a good thing to ask people not to come to their church, as a way to solve the space issue!  But for me, the root of the unease for me may be more in who we as the greater Church is becoming.  And I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but there is a bit of a fear for me of big, packaged, shiny things.  Is the church doing its job in the world?  Big doesn’t have to be bad, just like small isn’t necessarily good.

The ray of light I see is in our involvement with our small group.  Five couples and their kids.  When we were in the hospital with Ada, they showed up, prayed with us… brought meals to us afterwards.  We didn’t need to ask them to come to support us, they just did.  I yearn for being known, remembered, thought about.  I don’t do the best job of asking for community, but when I experience it, it is manna from Heaven.  

So, dear church, I thank you for the welcome.  Your letter has sparked deep thoughts from this momma who doesn’t often have the deepest of thoughts!

Now… what do YOU all think??