Our Hope For You is Unshaken: Pentecost Monday

Welcome to the  Pentecost Daybook series for these 8 days of celebration (through Trinity Sunday). May you know the power of the risen and reigning Christ resting on you and working through you today, tomorrow, and always!

LOOK: The piece, called “Les Colombes,” consists of as many as 1,500 origami doves, each suspended from a nearly invisible filament, 2020 installation at The Washington National Cathedral, Michael Pendry - Source

READ: Psalm 25; Psalm 9, 15; Deuteronomy 4:9-14; 2 Corinthians 1:1-11; Luke 14:25-35

PRAY: Prayer to the Holy Spirit

Come, Holy Spirit,
fill the hearts of your faithful,
and enkindle in us the fire of your love.
Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created,
and you shall renew the face of the earth.
Amen.

DO: Throughout the first week of Pentecost, I'll be sharing excerpts from my upcoming book, The Spacious Path: Practicing the Restful Way of Jesus in a Fragmented World. In Part 2 of the book, I invite us to consider Jesus invitation in Matthew 11:28-30 to “walk with him” as an invitation to walk with his church. First, I want to tell you about the community that shaped my default imagination for church.

GOING TO CHURCH IN MY PARENTS’ LIVING ROOM

In 1977, my father quit his job as a pastor to take up pastoring for free. He’d been working as a youth pastor for the church where he grew up, but when he began making radical suggestions for the church to reach out beyond its walls, the deacons asked him to be a visitation pastor instead. In the old days, visitation pastors were the ones in charge of visiting the sick and homebound church members and anyone who might be too ashamed to sit with the rest of the congregation on Sunday mornings.

My dad would have been a good visitation pastor if it weren’t for the neighbors filling up our living room for Bible study each week. They were asking the same uncomfortable questions as my father, and so we became a house church before that was trendy. Church in my earliest memories is vibrant, if not a bit chaotic, and easy to think of in terms of Jesus’s invitation to walk with him as a member of a church community. Yet parts of my experience as a pastor’s daughter left me with a limp, causing me to hobble into each church community I’ve entered since 1977.

The church of my childhood gathered as a small expression of sweeping reform in an established denomination, and so I learned to long for a church community open to change when old ways of worship form us apart from Jesus’ ways. At the same time, my parents and five siblings literally relied on our small church to remain stable enough to pay for our grocery and heating bills, and so I learned at a visceral level that a church that feels unstable threatens my human need for security. As a result, my early experiences with church have informed all that I’m anxious about and all that I’ve been longing for ever since.

This week we'll talk a bit about Jesus invitation to walk with Jesus in the unity of diversity in God’s beloved community—the Church. I hope you'll walk with me this week with a sense of anticipation that God's heart toward you is steadfast and good.

What community first formed your imagination for the church?

Read, reflect, journal, and share your own responses with the rest of us in the comment section below.