September is a sort of New Year for most of us. Even if we aren’t in school ourselves, there’s something in the air that feels like a beginning. Maybe it’s the onset of autumn with its longer evenings and that first hint of sweater weather. It feels like studiousness, like time rethink our routines.
As a pastor I find that this is especially so because over the summer I’ve been away from the normal patterns of church life in our own congregation. I’ve visited other churches, and I’ve had time simply to be a Christian person. You see, one of the dangers pastors have to watch out for is the risk of becoming a “professional Christian”—someone who facilitates or speaks into other people’s relationships with God but forgets to approach the reality for himself. Summer sends me into worship services as a participant rather than an organizer or convener. And even when I find myself speaking at a long weekend Bible camp as I did in early August, there is a freshness and expectation among the people that keeps me wrestling personally with God’s Word for my own life.
So I come back to my desk at the beginning of September with a renewed sense of who I am called to be and with many hopes about what the Lord might want to do in our congregation. I come back, in other words, with less separation between my own life as a child of God and my vocation to serve as a shepherd of God’s people than I might have had in June. The flipside of this is that I also have heightened ideals about what a Christian church can and ought to be. I’ve been reminded over the summer that Jesus died to bring people from death to life, to move us from sin and spiritual darkness to holiness and light. So the excitement with which I come back to my desk is also somewhat restless, or at least not easily satisfied. Contented in Christ, yes. Patient (or aiming to be) in waiting for God to do the work people’s hearts need, for sure. But definitely not so willing just to go along “playing church.”
It’s easy to wind up playing church, and it can be surprisingly difficult to notice the difference between this charade and real life in Christ. The routines of our own church life—and the sheltered nature of it, since most of us get settled into our own churches and are rarely confronted by other examples of community life in Christ—can lull us to sleep.
Our family’s summer included visits to a once-somber Plymouth Brethren assembly now enlivened by a younger demographic and an increased African presence; to a black Baptist church that stocks Kleenex boxes under every second pew in the expectation of emotional responses (and indeed it was in this church that I found myself tearfully responding to God in my heart in the middle of one of the worship songs, though I hadn’t noticed the Kleenexes then); to a suburban congregation populated by many young families whose worship is informal enough to allow personal testimony to fit naturally in the service. Our summer included that camp weekend at which a relatively new Christian felt happy to approach me to express gratitude for what God had shown her over the weekend about areas of her life that needed to become more Christlike. And our summer included a twelve-day visit with two on-fire-for-Jesus South Americans in their twenties who manage both to be well-taught in theology and daily alive to the expectation that God will speak to them through Scripture to lead them along to the next step on their journey.
So all of these pieces of summer lead me back to church at the beginning of fall with a burning desire. I want to see the church come alive to Jesus—to receive his gracious pardon for sin, to hear his radical call to holiness, to throw off the things that hinder us along the way, to come to the Bible with the thirst of a parched person coming out of a desert who is ready to taste the living water that life in Jesus is. I want to see individuals who are ready to grow—in their knowledge of God, in their personal commitment to him, in their daily relationship with him, in their readiness to offer their gifts for his service. I want to see a community that understands its calling to be about introducing others to the life-changing truth and good news of Jesus Christ.
All these desires, and that restless feeling I’ve been feeling as summer ends, are longings for what the New Testament tells us is simply the goal of this life in Christ. “The death he [Christ] died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:10-11). May God make all of us bold to expect this life for ourselves and those around us. He says it is more than possible. It’s what we’re made for.
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