Thinking Some Things Through

I have had a very busy weekend.
On Friday evening a group of churches in my area convened for our second cooperative community prayer event.  It was an energetic, intense, service of prayer and praise.  It had the feeling, and the volume of a rock concert, it pulled people into several movements of prayer, following the tried and true ACTS pattern (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication).  It was one, very encouraging vision of the Church in the world, diversity on many axes: race, age, denomination, theology, politics, economic class, and probably others as well.  Joy and intimacy with God and each other, reaching out across many of the boundaries that so regularly hold us back from true community, it was good.
On Saturday, I had to say goodbye to a member of my congregation who was also one of my closest friends for the last couple years.  We had a Presbyterian Church funeral, we sang hymns, we shared memories, and of course there was chicken salad afterwards.  Our church was as full as I have seen it in a while, because the man who passed was a big, friendly, honest man, who collected friends wherever he went, this also was good, but in a different way.
On Sunday we had our normal early service with a small crowd and a sermon about Lazarus.  Then we had our choir cantata in the later service.  The cantata was involved and had taken a lot of work and many hours of preparation.  It was sacred music that told the story of Jesus' life, death and resurrection, it was good as well, but in still yet a different way.
What I'm thinking about this Monday morning is how rare it actually is for anyone to experience three such different expressions of the faith community on three successive days.  And what is probably even more rare is for someone to be really able to appreciate all three without privileging or preferring one sort of thing over the other. I suspect it's rare because, even though I was a participant in all three things, I actually found myself starting to "pick a winner."  This is sort of my attempt to stop that nonsense.
I call it nonsense because I am beginning to realize that all of our sorting and narrowing, focusing and classifying, is quite frankly killing us.  I mean, if you only ever go in for the sort of church that you like the best, or which feels most comfortable to you, you will inevitably self-segregate along any one of the many ways we sort our lives out: race, economics, worship style, theology, whatever the dividing principle happens to be, it is still precisely that division.
Richard Rohr has been coincidentally (and by that I mean at the same time, not by accident or random chance) hitting me with idea of Christ as a unifying force in all of creation.  During a season when I am even more focused than usual on the story of Jesus, who was the Christ. I am getting hammered this morning by the idea that too much of what we have gotten on about in the church over the course of our history has just been an unfortunate distraction from the image of Christ that should be our center and our guide.  We need to be saved from that distraction.
I'm not saying this as someone who is particularly enlightened about the all-present truth of Christ, but as someone who is regularly guilty of missing it.  I have sat in judgment on church services, styles and sermons that I felt were pretty sub-standard.  I will admit that I have "preacher's disease" something awful, which means that I am unusually skeptical and judgmental of other people doing what I do.  I tend, as much as anyone, to want things the way I want them.  I want the sermon to be the kind of sermon I find stimulating, I want the music to be the kind of music I enjoy, at the volume I find comfortable.
The long and short is that I want to be in control of things, including and perhaps especially, how I worship God.  That mindset, of which I am guilty, is in many ways what is killing the church in our world today.  It may also be stifling our spiritual development as human beings.