This Is My Church

The church Trustees had a great deal on carpet.  If they were willing to go with a mixed pattern of square carpet tiles, they could save a few dollars per square yard of carpeting.  So from Friday to Saturday the carpet layer worked almost ‘round the clock in order to get the carpet down in the hallways of our building before Sunday morning.

The reaction of the Sunday morning crowd was not pretty.  Nor was the carpet.  The mixed pattern of carpet squares looked AWFUL, according to many (although many of the children seemed enthralled, as if they’d never considered carpet to be so interesting!).  Many people were so incensed by the carpet that they became (they said) almost physically sick.  The Trustees were chastened and the poor carpet layer had to come back and undo his hard work and lay down a pattern that MATCHED!  And the initial savings the Trustees intended was lost.

What’s this story got to do with Jesus?  Maybe more than you think.  I mentioned in my last blog/article that somehow we’ve got to make a personal claim on the gospel, like the apostle Paul when he writes, “according to my gospel.”  I believe that same personal claim is necessary for our relationship to the church.  So much contemporary conversation about spirituality seems unattached to anything real, as if we can have our spiritual experiences without relationships to actual people and institutions.  This disembodied spirituality is a copout, an avoidance of the sometimes hard work of living in community.  Authentic spirituality involves relationships with other people and the institutions to which they belong – in Christian terms – the church.

So, when folks get mad about the pattern of the carpet, they are actually making a personal claim about their faith – “This is MY church and I CARE about what happens here.”  While we may think that carpeting is really a small thing in the grand scheme of things, I would rather have people upset about carpeting than for them not to care about their church. 

Sometimes I get frustrated by church folks who get upset about what I consider petty matters.  But at least it means they care.  I’d rather have a dozen people in church who care about what happens in and to their church than to have one hundred people who don’t.  You see, the church belongs to Jesus, and therefore, even for all its failings, it is worth caring about.  And because it belongs to Jesus, it also belongs to me, because Jesus has invited me in on what he’s doing in the world.  The church of Jesus is MY church and I want everyone to care.