Brides and Hatred

Church Membership has been on my mind lately.  Mostly because I'm contemplating becoming and official member of a church here in DC.  I've always (ok, not always, but definitely the last 5 years) had a huge issue with organized religion.  It wasn't always that way; I grew up in the church, and I remember through 5th, 6th, 7th grade telling people that I actually enjoyed going to church.  Weird?  Maybe. A good thing?  I don't know.  Maybe - it led me to a lot of suffering, but ultimately was part of the Great Symphony.  Even after having "re-discovered" my faith, I found it hard to find myself comfortable in a church setting.... After everything I'd been through, I just wasn't entirely sure I wanted to put myself in that situation again.  For a while, I thought, "well, I believe, and that's good enough.  Some people need a church community, for some people it fosters growth, but not for me.  I don't need that.  I can just believe by myself, after all, this is between me and God, right?"  (In retrospect, that was just delusional... as an extrovert, regardless of it's biblical context or necessity, I need community.)  Once I realized that the Christian faith was not supposed to be lived out in caves by ourselves, I thought to myself - well, I have good Christian friends, I can talk to them, enjoy time with them, and that will just be my version of church, my community, I don't need a formal church to be a part of, because that only leads to problems.  I can have my own church.  And for a while, that was fine.

And so I just lived with a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear and anger and avoidance and resentment about the church built up inside me - mostly fear.   But then, spontaneously, God convicted me that church was, in fact, a good thing (I've not the slightest clue about how God was able to change my heart like that - it literally happened instantaneously, He convinced me that this was so and that I was never going to be afraid of church again.  What?!  This is a question I plan on asking when I get to heaven...).  And that it was maybe something I was going to need out here, all by myself.  And so instead of God asking me to overcome my fear, He just took it away.  Which in a way, was even scarier... But suddenly I didn't have any excuses anymore.  And so I decided that I needed to start looking for a church.

And then God put one in my lap.  It's this great place called Restoration church.  It's super close to campus, people there are wonderfully nice and welcoming, and I already feel like I'm at home there (which, I have to admit, is still a weird feeling).  And they do formal church membership, which involves a class and some other stuff.  It was weird to me at first, because even though I grew up around church, not every church has formal membership, or a formal process to become a member, and since mine didn't I really had no idea what to expect.  So I went to the class just to see what this whole thing was about.  It was interesting.  Different.  Challenging.  Open.  Thoughtfully and tactfully put together.  And during the process, we discussed the biblical foundations of church membership and the church as a whole.  It wasn't something I'd thought about (or liked the idea of, really), that God not just gives us the opportunity for, but actively demands and expects that we be part of a church...

But I was listening to a sermon yesterday about the church, and the pastor discussed the church in the context of 3 analogies commonly used in the New Testament - the family, the body, and the bride.  At the very end of the sermon, in discussing us as Christ's bride, he used the analogy of someone walking up to him and saying, "Gosh, J.  I really like you, you're so funny and smart - I really hate your wife, D. - but you're just so awesome!"  I wasn't following until he equated it to us saying, "God, I love you but I hate your bride."... ouch!  I'd never thought about it that way before.  And it then occurred to me that Paul's analogy to the body of Christ is similar - a Hand cannot expect to survive alone... it can't even survive if it's near a body, or occasionally interacts with an Eye and a Toe... but rather it must be attached to an entire body to even be alive, much less thrive and be active.  The hand can be cut off to preserve the body, but the body cannot be cut off to preserve the hand.

So I don't know if i will officially be a member of Restoration or not - I'm still praying about that one.  But I am more convinced than ever that the church, although flawed, is essential.  Body, here I come!