One of the most interesting things about this year has been church services. We have become accustomed to the “special song” request. We have heard sermons in many different languages. One time we heard a sermon in Hungarian, translated at the pulpit into Ukrainian, and then whispered to us in English by a translator who sat behind us. We have led music and given sermons. Sometimes, rarely, we are only asked to introduce ourselves and can enjoy the service.
In Malaysia this month, we have a very strange combination of things. First, we have no Sunday morning church ministry. Second, our contact doesn’t require us to attend church anywhere (Consequently, finding one has been an adventure). Third, we go to a communal worship twice a week at a House of Prayer (which is spectacular).
Almost everyone on our team has struggled with what to do with our Sunday mornings. Do I have to go to church? Is worship at the House of Prayer “enough” to be considered church? Are my teammates going to judge me as irresponsible or lazy if I don’t get up on Sunday morning?
You see, the hard thing about Sunday morning church on the Race is that it faces impossible standards. What makes a church a church is the family, the community. We are at best visitors in a place and it cannot match the community we have spent years growing into at churches back home. Sunday church on the race is a ministry. We are there to serve and edify other believers, who are usually annoyingly happy to see us and exasperatingly excited to hear us preach or sing. Chelsey and I decided that at the House of Prayer, we feel like we walk through the doors and the world slows down, everything melts away and there is space to look face-to-face with our Beloved. At Sunday Church, however, things seem to speed up, we are thrust this way and that, expectations are weightily placed on our shoulders, and we are reminded of the worshipful atmospheres we left behind at home.
As a professional minister for the last decade, this feeling is not exactly foreign to me. It is hard to reconcile our call to serve and our call to praise. We are often stuck between our desperate desire to love people and the drastic necessity of maintaining something that is uniquely between us and God.
I think that our Christian society has placed too much of an emphasis on Sunday morning church. Obviously, WE are the church, the body of Christ. And all we do is an act of worship. And the Bible speaks about being disciplined in the habit of meeting together. And we are created to love relationally. The scary thing about Christian culture is the false idea that all this fully happens in two hours on Sunday morning. It is sad the shame and guilt we put ourselves through when we might miss those two hours and the free pass we allow ourselves for the other one-hundred-sixty-six hours of the week.
Our team has such beautiful and honest hearts. But we are shackled by the threats of evidence in our lives, rather than trusting in the abiding of fruit. I really don’t know what the answer is for any of us about the Sunday morning question this month. But I know I want to worry less about going to church and more about being the church. I want to question less what I “get out” of church and more who I am in Church. I want to make decisions less out of what others may think or the condemnation I’m afraid of, and more out of who I am as a son of the King.
Racers, it is ok to sleep in on Sunday mornings. Jesus followers throughout the world, it is OK to sleep in on Sunday mornings. But to all of us a warning: it is not ok to sleep through the true story of our lives. What would life look like if we took off our church clothes and put on the full armor of God?
