Stripped Bare, Part 1
What draws people to church? Is it the enthusiastic, entertaining, knowledgeable, dynamic speaker? Is it the heart-pumping, arm-raising, passionate worship music? Or perhaps it’s the opportunity to learn about the word of God, to meet with others, to fellowship, to congregate and be a part of something? Or maybe it’s a mix of these things.
While none of these are bad in and of themselves, I have started wondering what is at the core of “church.” What would happen if we stripped Sunday morning services of the church building, the entertaining, passionate preacher, the heart-stirring music, the cables, microphones, and speakers, the stage, the fancy lights, the comfy chairs, and everything else. What would “church” look like? Would we find the Holy Spirit there? Would we find a genuine hunger and thirst for encountering the presence of the Almighty God? Or would people be turned off by the lack of “stuff” that we tend to associate with church and find themselves off somewhere else?
As we have traveled across the globe and encountered different parts of the Body of Christ, I have come to realize more and more that there are only two things that are needed for “church”: God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and His People. Everything else is just frosting. And let’s be brutally honest… the frosting can sometimes be very distracting. Staying on the cake analogy, you can have beautiful, colorful, elaborately decorative frosting, but it’s the cake that is the depth, substance, and true flavor of a cake. Church without the Holy Spirit is nothing but sugary sweet, cavity-inducing frosting. It might satisfy your sugar cravings for a moment, but it’s the cake beneath that satisfies your soul. Disclaimer: if you don’t like cake, this analogy doesn’t quite work, but I hope you get my point.
I recently read a story about an underground church in Asia where people gathered with but one desire. To encounter God. They risk everything, including their lives, just to gather together and to learn about God’s Word. They might not even have their own individual Bibles, but they come together in earnestness and expectation, wanting to meet God and learn from His Holy Spirit within the context of the community that we were created to be a part of.
Love God. Love People. It’s the greatest commandment, and really, the only commandment worth living.
Stripped Bare, Part 2
Beyond stripping my understanding of what “church” is, God has been stripping me bare of my “self.” I have a tendency to be self-sufficient and self-dependent to a fault. But I believe I’m in a season where the Lord keeps stripping me of everything that I keep clinging too…all of those things that keep me from knowing Him more and receiving all that He has for me. I have been stripped of so many day-to-day comforts on this journey, things that I used to take for granted (two showers a day, for instance, or the opportunity to choose my own food), but those “sacrifices” pale in comparison to the often painful crucifying of self… of letting go and letting God.
When we first learned that we would be heading to the Philippines, I kept hoping we would remain in Manila, selfishly hoping I would be able to reconnect with some of the friends I had made during my two years in the city. I know the culture, I know the area, I know the language. And God knew all of this and knew that if I remained in Manila, I would not only be self-dependent and self-sufficient, but being in a place where there were so many people to see would have distracted me from focusing wholeheartedly on His ministry for me.
In two days, Team CLP and Team TUFF (Drew’s and Kayla’s new team, under the leadership of Brandon Barnum) will be heading to MalayBalay, Mindanao Island, in the southern part of the Philippines. The ministry opportunities ahead of us sound exciting indeed, from tutoring children at school, to working in a juvenile detention recovery center, to ministering to young women who have come out of abusive situations, to constructing new ministry centers, to some things I’m sure we haven’t even heard about yet.
I honestly am thrilled to be heading to a new part of the Philippines that I have never been to, to learn a completely different language (the people there speak Visaya), and to be away from city living where too many other things would have consumed my non-ministry hours. I won’t have the opportunity to slip into being fiercely independent again, nor tempted by distractions that could have been (friends, malls, Starbucks, commercialism and consumerism, and Jeepney noise).
I am eager to let God do His work and to let Him continue to strip me of me and fill me with Him. Romans 8:13 says, “For if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” Though it may sound painful, being stripped bare means there is more room for Him. May He ever increase in my life as I decrease. Amen!
