The Road Is How

I'm going to start off this morning with about as Pentecostal a statement as you are ever likely to hear from a Presbyterian: the Holy Spirit did a great thing last night.  For almost two years I have been meeting with a group of local pastors to pray once a month.  These men are not my usual church tribe, they are Baptist, Wesleyan, Nazarene and a few of indeterminate denominational affiliation.  Most of the group are church planters at different stages of development, the youngest having just launched his church in September of 2016.
There have been many times in the development of this little group that I have had to have the mainline log removed from my eye.  I have talked before about how great diversity is, usually with regard to race or culture or being inclusive of LGBTQ people.  But over the past year I have learned that perhaps diversity must also be celebrated outside of the liberal barbie dream house.  For instance if you want to truly cross boundaries between white and black churches you're going to have to deal with the fact that many, many black churches and churchgoers, skew a bit more conservative and maybe even fundamentalist than those of us who hold up Martin Luther King Jr. as a saint of diversity would like to imagine.  The truth of the matter is, I'm not sure how MLK would have dealt with the inclusion of LGBT people in the church.  Would his civil rights ethic overcome the traditions of his southern culture, his baptist hermeneutic, his 1950 mindset?  I don't know.  History didn't give us the chance to find out.
Last night, a group of different pastors led our congregations together to experience what much maligned American Christianity could look like.  There are times, even as I serve a congregation that is alive and kicking, that I am perhaps too ready to put a toe tag on American Christianity and pronounce it DOA.  I need to stop that. What we did last night was put our egos to the side, there was no featured preacher, there was a blended group of musicians from different churches, there was no offering for a cause, no agenda other than to offer ourselves to God in prayer and praise.
In all honesty, none of us really knew what was going to happen, or how it was going to go, but all of us, from our different quarters came to it with hope and faith and not much else. Our preparation was long, but also very cursory, the script for the evening was only an outline, a few scripture passages read, and some songs sung, and the people of God praying together.
We didn't have to agree on doctrine, or politics, or much of anything except Christ.  The theme for the night, in true 21st century fashion had a hashtag label: #bettertogether.  The idea is that the identity of the church is much more than the individual congregations that are it's most common expression.  A problem for all of our churches is the tendency to become too inward focused, it is a trap that afflicts churches from their very inception.  Even a church that has only been officially launched for a few months has to consciously think about keeping their focus out into the community rather than dwelling on their first flourishing steps.  With time, churches lose this consciousness and focus and settle into routines, then it becomes their guiding purpose to perpetuate those routines and the "feel" of their church.
For you GSPC folks reading this, don't worry, I'm not about to try and make you Pentecostal, we're going to stay nice and Presbyterian, because that is our part of the Body of Christ.  But for those of you that attended the #bettertogether event last night, I hope you saw that something different was going on, and it wasn't just a product of being louder than you're used to, it was a function of a bunch of people stepping off of their home turf, coming out of their tombs and opening their hearts to the movement of the Holy Spirit.
Honestly, that should be something that happens in every worship service, no matter what the style or the tradition.  The thing that was different last night was not what happened up front with the leaders.  We purposefully put our egos on hold and forewent introductions and such, each of us consciously stayed in our lane.  We simply trusted that God would speak and move in open hearts, and that is what happened.
Glimpses of this kind of church, whether it was a pilgrim's mass in Spain or an ecumenical event in Waldorf, are moments that restore my hope in what the church can be. I guess I need the occasional dramatic slap up side the head to see the church as it is and as it should be. It's a dose of excitement, but I needed to be reminded that what happened last night is actually possible in some form any time hearts open in prayer and worship.

And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

Your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.

-Joel 2: 28