meditatio at the water's edge

Life Between the Meetings...

Someone recently encouraged me by telling me that my teaching brings God into the ordinary. I hope so, because that’s where most of us live. We are called to be a group of people living under the ruling and reigning of God, and we are only faithful to that calling when God is visibly present in ‘the ordinary’ parts of our lives together.

Recently, following a viewing of Star Wars Episode II, I sat in Applebee’s with two of my friends. We ordered quesadillas at 10:30pm--not always a wise thing to do--and talked about the movie for a while. After we had exhausted that subject, we talked about what it means to be the church.

As I sat there listening and sharing in the conversation, I realized that the church had come to Applebee’s. There we were, the three of us in this ordinary conversation with Christ in the center. As I think about that experience, and many others like it, I remember something I heard recently. Jonathan Lee, a church planter in Odenton, Maryland said, “Church is not about the meetings. It’s about life between the meetings.”

The church is not about a person (“I go to some locally famous pastor’s church”), place (“I go to the Crystal Cathedral”), or event (“I went to the service this morning”).1 The church is about people ‘sharing life together’ with Christ in the center. It is about the radical transformation that happens by God’s action in our lives during the everyday, ordinary events and non-events of life together.

Let’s be thinking about our lives between the meetings and how we can increasingly invite Christ to take his place in the center of our relationships.
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(1) Thanks for this idea go to Todd Hunter.