Mother’s Day

We vis­ited my mother’s new/old church on mother’s day. She recently moved back to the town she grew up in and of course went to the same church she went to as a child. I have a great mother and am so thank­ful for her. It was great to be with her on Mother’s Day. I have learned so much from her and although I can’t blame her for my fail­ures, she can cer­tainly take credit for any vic­to­ries I have had.

Her church is a new church in that most of the peo­ple that attended it when she was a child are no longer there. It isn’t even in the same build­ing or loca­tion that I used to visit with my grand­par­ents. However, there are a few peo­ple there that she knows, enough that I am guess­ing she feels right at home and it isn’t really a “new” church.

In some ways it is still the same church even for me although I cer­tainly don’t remem­ber any­one from when I went there as a child. All local churches are all a part of the one Church, the Body of Christ. It should not mat­ter what local man­i­fes­ta­tion of the Body we attend, we are home.

We can visit church after church and see many dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties of churches. Even the same church will change over time. But as long as the peo­ple of a church seek to have a per­sonal rela­tion­ship with God and to pass it along to oth­ers we can go to any of those churches and find a home.

Now that isn’t to say that we will feel com­fort­able at every church. Just as every­one has their own per­son­al­ity, so do local churches. We will nor­mally find cer­tain churches more like that comfy chair that we can sit in and just feel great. And the comfy chair I like may very well be a hor­ri­bly uncom­fort­able chair for some­one else. That doesn’t make one bet­ter than the other.

We need to find a church that we are com­fort­able in.. but not nec­es­sar­ily too com­fort­able. Our church should always chal­lenge us, move us to new areas in our rela­tion­ship with God and in our rela­tion­ships with oth­ers. Our churches should chal­lenge us to get out of our comfy chair and into the world, to res­cue the lost and min­is­ter to the needy.