Mom and I turned off the main road and onto the familiar side street, our eyes scanning the corner lot where we spent untold hours back in the early ’90s. The church seemed not to have changed much in 30 years—solid rock walls, the angular slope of the steepled roof, bottle-glass windows from the ’70s. The parking lot was cracked and aging, long overdue for repaving. The lawn was a tangled mass of cropped weeds that needed attention. The neighboring parsonage had been condemned, boarded up, and fenced off.
It was no longer a Foursquare church. The sign announced an Indonesian Seventh-day Adventist church worshiped there instead. It was Saturday, but our drive-by must have been too late to see any activity.
We attended New Life Fellowship Foursquare Church during my high school years. We were rebounding from the shock of our previous pastor’s moral failure at a vibrant charismatic church where we discovered the third person of the Trinity and found deep and unconditional love.
At that church, although we hung on through the transitional period under an interim pastor, eventually it was clear that closing the doors made the most sense. The church had been too tightly wedded to the founding pastor’s vision and charisma to easily disentangle itself. Too many people had left. The building was far too big for the remnant that remained.
With wounds still tender, we found New Life Fellowship. This congregation was open to the work of the Spirit but grounded in the Scriptures and part of a 70-year-old denomination that gave it more stability than the nondenominational church that had folded. We threw ourselves into it with abandon. When it came to church, our family was all in.
We showed up on Sunday and Wednesday and for workdays and special events. I joined the youth group and was soon helping to plan activities. My parents became elders. My dad ran the sound booth. I started a missions prayer group and began raising support for my first overseas trip. Our family was always the last to leave, so the pastor eventually gave my parents a set of keys so we could lock up on our way out.
Our congregation was a hodgepodge of mostly lower-middle-class families barely paying the bills (plus one doctor and one golf-course designer) and a disproportionate number of single moms. There was a woman with an alcoholic husband who only showed up intermittently to offer a moving testimony whenever he decided to sober up. A couple my parents’ age with an in-home daycare and teens who were always on the edge of trouble. A retired couple whose quiet presence strengthened the rest of us. A woman in chronic pain who liked to sit in the back so she could dance during worship, using her body to honor the Creator. On a good Sunday, maybe 60 people came.
But here’s the deal: We loved each other. I met regularly with Donna, 60 years my senior, to pray for missionaries. I recall vigorous discussions with the seven or eight teens in my youth group about what it should look like to follow Jesus. I spent hours talking theology with our volunteer youth leader, who was a plumber by day but found his real purpose in leading us. Bernice cooked dinner for the whole church every Wednesday so we could fellowship around the table before youth group and Bible study. The pastor appointed me “missions coordinator” and gave me the microphone during the service once a month to give updates about the missionaries our church supported.
The building wasn’t much to look at, but we were family. When I went off to Bible college, the church celebrated my graduation and sent me off with tears and hugs. Their words of blessing and generous gifts spoke of their investment in me as a person. I still have the bookends from pastor Jim in my faculty office, two spinning globes that signified both my love for learning and my love for world missions.
‘Why Church?’ Is the Wrong Question
I returned home after my freshman year in the summer of 1996. I don’t remember whether it was his idea or mine, but pastor Jim gave me the opportunity to teach an adult-education class so that I could pass along what I was learning in college. I designed a course entitled Understanding Worldviews to help us have better conversations with our unbelieving neighbors.
Looking back, the thing that shocks me most is that he attended my class with his wife and required all the elders (including my parents) and other pastors (including my youth pastor) to attend as well. Our church had no formal mentoring program, but pastor Jim created opportunities for me to hone my skills. He saw that I had something to offer—never mind that I was a teenager—and he made space for me.
One of my favorite passages during that season was Paul’s exhortation to Timothy: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity” (1 Tim. 4:12). I was indeed young, but age was not a disqualifying factor in God’s mission.
I have loved and been loved by many churches in my nearly five decades of life, and New Life is no exception. We were a ragtag group of ordinary people gathering to meet with an extraordinary God. To show up with one another week after week knit us together as family. The fruit of our life together had nothing to do with rebranding or casting a five-year vision or crafting a mission statement (although we tried that too). It had everything to do with our habit of meeting together.
The building was dated. The sermons weren’t unusually arresting. The music was canned. (As I recall, we sang to prerecorded “tracks” on the electric keyboard with the help of keys and guitar and a couple vocalists.) We wielded no political influence. We simply kept coming and connecting with others who were following Jesus.
This is the way. Ordinary followers of Jesus gathering to worship an extraordinary God, loving one another as best we knew how, and waiting for Christ’s return, just as Paul exhorts us in Ephesians:
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (2:19–22)
We (and our church building) may not have been much to look at, but together we became a holy temple for God’s presence. In an age when churches are so often in the news for the wrong reasons, it’s worth remembering the innumerable ordinary congregations like my childhood church that experience radical transformation in incremental ways.
Week after week we resist the temptation to sort ourselves into factions and exclude those who have no worldly power to wield on our behalf. We do this by gathering to worship and hear the Word while we wait together for Christ’s return. Let’s not give up this habit. The world depends upon it.
Carmen Joy Imes is an associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and an author. Her latest book is Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters.
