Church in the Park

Yesterday I did something that I know I have never done before. It was the first Sunday our table group got together in the morning rather than the evening. We met at Countryside Park at 11:00 AM for picnic lunch and fellowship, and followed lunch with a great game of adults vs. kids wiffle ball (adults won and showed no mercy) and some sand volleyball. A neighbor family and another boy from our neighborhood also came. I know, without any doubt, that this was a first in my life. Yes, I've had plenty of picnics before; and yes, I've even "skipped church" before and done other things on Sunday morning. Yesterday was neither of those. I did not skip church yesterday. I met with my church yesterday. And we were the church, in a way that was quite unexpected.

When you've been doing something a certain way for a few decades, your pre-conditioning alerts you to any changes. I was aware that church services were going on all morning, and that we weren't at one of them. The recordings kept playing in my mind: all the times I've urged people to be at church on Sunday, all the meetings I've been in where the main goal was to figure out how to get people to services, and all the frustration when the data came back telling us that half the church was absent on any given day (which is true even for the "best" churches in our community). There was an internal struggle going on, and I had to sort through it and find the truth. At moments like these, God has a tendency to clear things up, which he did in a dramatic fashion.

One of our neighbor families lost a loved one unexpectedly this weekend. I am thankful that we knew the family and cared about them, which meant that we were aware of it when it happened. I wonder how many times a family experiences this kind of thing in our community and no one around them knows about it? Their youngest son was too young to process the environment of grief the family would be in throughout the day, so we took him with us to the park for lunch, and another family from our neighborhood came also. We prayed for the family around the picnic table at lunch. During the volleyball game, the other dad and I hung out with this boy who had just received news that his grandfather had died. As he played around, he would just spontaneously ask us questions about his grandfather's death. He wanted to know about where his grandfather was, whether we had ever lost our grandfathers and how we felt, whether his grandfather was happy, that kind of thing. We discovered in the course of conversation that all three of our families have Scottish heritage (btw, Cameron means "crooked nose" in the ancient Scottish tongue), and we speculated about whether we might all be related somehow, and that this boy's grandfather was reunited with relatives who had come before him.

There was no sermon yesterday and no singing (except in heaven). Instead of being concerned with sound systems and message notes, I listened to my neighbor help another neighbor's son in his grief over a lost love one. I shared a meal with my church, played with kids and adults (who have often forgotten how to play). We had attendance of 21, which was over 125% of our membership. The fellowship and ministry that happened at the park could not have happened at a church service. As we were leaving, one family said it was the most fun they remembered having on Sunday morning. Since they had been to several services where I preached or led worship, I tried not to be offended by this.

I'm not advocating bailing out on church services. This is not a license to blow off church, which we did not do yesterday. We're not going to stop having services, and I'm not going to stop encouraging people to prioritize them. They serve an important and strategic purpose in ministry. But they aren't everything, and the important things they don't accomplish have to be addressed. We're only having services two Sundays per month specifically to make room for this kind of thing. But each of us has to take advantage of it. I know many of us still feel a compulsion to attend a service each Sunday, or at least feel a little guilty if we don't. But our consciences would probably serve us better if we felt equal pangs of guilt over not engaging people around us, not meeting the needs of others, not loving our neighbors as ourselves and not developing the kinds of relationships with other Christians that the early church did. I'll even go so far as to say that some of us are hiding in church services. It takes less to sit and soak than it does to engage and love. We all need to learn, but some of us have already heard more than we'll practice in a lifetime.

We begin a new teaching series this week called "Life in the Margins." This month we're all going to be challenged to live our lives differently, and much of it starts with how we spend our time. So this coming Sunday, BE AT THE SERVICE! But come with an open mind and a willingness to try something new. As I learned this weekend, investing your time even a little bit differently can make big changes in your life and the lives of people around you.

If any of our group members would like to weigh in on our table at the park, leave a comment. What was it like for you?