Church, in its many forms and definitions has been on my mind a lot lately. There isn’t some grand story or huge God moment I can share, just some thoughts I am having along the way. I have always been very involved in the church and just consider it part of my life, not really the most important part of my faith but certainly necessary. When I embarked on this race, I was thinking how cool it would be to see churches all over the world and to understand what church looked like as a group of believers no matter where you were. Then the journey started, and along with many other things, church was not what I anticipated.
I was surprised to learn that missionaries or at least this group of them, rarely attended churches. I was even more surprised to find out how much that affected me. Since one of the hardest things for me to leave back home was my church body, I finally saw how much it meant to me. I’m still not sure what to think about spending months in countries and not seeing how they worship or experiencing true worship with the people in a “church” setting.
Then I realized how I have experienced “church” in other ways. Having a self-led Sunday service with our team or other teams is nice or spending an evening just singing worship songs together. The other night, a couple of teammates and I decided to just peek into the church here at the ICM base after feeling God call us there. Of course, we were invited in and asked to share an encouraging word to the Indian people. My teammate Kayla broke a huge wall of fear and sang beautifully for them, then I shared a brief word for them. It was so wonderful to just be in the presence of other believers outside of our team. Even today, at the children’s home, we were prepping the older boy’s room for painting. While we worked, we sang worship songs in this room which is an old church, now used to house these precious children. Filling the old church with songs of praise was so enlivening and I saw that creating church in as many opportunities as possible is so important here. Not because a church building holds any power or “good Christians go to church” but because there is power and life in the body spending this day of rest in communal prayer and worship.
So I guess my struggle remains. I will continue to seek out church in both traditional and new ways while seeing what this journey is.
