by Pastor Dan Baumgartner

The church. It’s not always a positive image these days. It often serves as a target for people who have been wounded by others, or who are angry at God or who are emerging into new understandings of God, and find the church to be rooted in yesterday’s news. About all I can say to that is: guilty. In fact, the church is far too easy of a target. Bernard Lonergan once wrote that

“the church always arrives on the scene a little breathless and a little late.”

I regularly have conversation with people who say things like,

“I believe in Jesus, but I have big problems with the church.”

Join the crowd!

Usually I tell the Newcomer’s class,

“Some days I’m still a little surprised to find myself working as a pastor. I always had a kind of love/hate relationship with the church…some days I still do!”

Some days, especially in our individualistic culture, it seems tempting just to get our own spiritual needs met and let other people figure it out for themselves.

But. From our earliest records, the first thing that Jesus did in ministry was to begin to build a community of people around him. The first thing that Jesus’ followers did after Pentecost was begin to build a community of people. And the first thing they did after that was to meet in many small communities of people, talking and praying and worshiping and arguing and forgiving. For all of the warts, mistakes, sins and downright lunacies committed in the last 2,000 years, the people who believe in Jesus Christ remain inevitably interlocked with one another in this community we call the church. And for all of the frustrations, we see and reflect the face of Christ far better together than we ever do as isolated individuals.

Between now and July 9, our sermons will focus around this theme of “Following Jesus Together.” We’ll look at a variety of practices and characteristics that mark a community trying to follow Christ. After all, as Leslie Newbigin once said:

“It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life…but a visible community.”