At the Margins

My friends at Ma Siss’s Place and Quincy Street Missional Church were featured on the front page of the Boston Globe this morning.

This first in four part series will continue the next three days (I will post a link each day) and features many pictures and some other multimedia.

“From a Dorchester Chop Shop, to a Place to Pray”

Last week’s issue of U.S. News and World Report featured a couple of articles that include Common Table.

The cover story ”A Return to Tradition” and “Mixing Jesus with Java: The Appeal of New Religious Communities.”

Culpeper House’s sister community in Southeast Washington’s Anacostia Neighborhood has asked everyone to go to http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/ah_change_the_world/text/0,,HGTV_30676_65470,00.html and vote for HGTV to help cleanup their neighborhood

There are tons of pictures from my recent trip to El Salvador posted in Facebook.  The good news is that anyone can see them at http://www.mattpritchard.com/pictures/facebook

This week I was speaking with someone about the church she once knew dying.

It’s kind of like my first year of college. I was pretty homesick. I longed for home day after day.

Eventually it dawned on me that I wasn’t in fact just desiring a place–home, but actually a time. The reality was that I could go back home, but doing so would do little to truly affect my homesickness as all my friends from high school were no longer there. I realized I was longing more for a season than for a place.

Given going back was not a possibility, I knew I had to embrace the new season God had given me.

Likewise, many are homesick for a church that no longer exists. No matter how much we try to keep everything physically the same, the reality is we cannot return to the season we are longing for, even if we think it was better, it has passed away.

Of course, the best way to get over homesickness is, instead of constantly seeking to return to where you were, to embrace the new place you are. Seek to know it, understand it, and live in it and eventually it will become home.

Tomorrow I will be starting my first day disciplemaking (in a formal capacity) at Fairlington Presbyterian Church.

As everyone who knows me responds, “you’re going to work for a church?!?!?!” In fact, the only reason I started blogging about the Church and my faith was that I thought I’d never work for a church.  God has a funny way of busting out our visions of the future for His.

My thinking on church has not really changed. The Senior Pastor is a good friend and neighbor. She has been working hard to steer those in her care towards being the Church and I will be part of that change. I’ve been invited because of relationships and my giftings and not my institutional church qualifications. As anyone who spends any time with me quickly discovers, I am both passionate about helping people become disciples of Christ–seeking after him with reckless abandon and obeying the Holy Spirit–and building authentic Christian community (a.k.a. the Church).

God will continue to be providing my income, just through a church now and not the Rural Trust, and as such, I will continue to be ultimately responsible to Him.

I’m certainly more than a bit trepidatious, but at the same time, so excited!

It’s funny how quickly I revert back into the institutional function.  It’s something I’m going to have to be mindful of—a lot.  There was a little snafu in the middle of Sunday’s worship where I said I would pray and the woman who was sharing her story (she did such a great job!) thought I was asking her to pray and a look of dread came over her.  I cleared it up that I was planning to pray. 

At the end, she and I talked about how hard it is for her to pray out loud (something I’ve heard from many people before).  She added that I pray so well.  I told her that one of my friends has often challenged me, “do you talk to anyone in the manner that you pray out loud.”  The truth is I don’t.  I use stilted flourishes, not to mention a different voice.

For a little while in high school I sang in the church choir.  We would pray at the beginning of each rehearsal and I remember always looking forward to hearing Ms. C pray.  Unlike anyone I’d known to that point, she truly prayed to “Daddy.”  Her prayers were simple, intimate, and loving, but at the same time, there was no confusing the awe and revere she had for her Father.

When I pray religious prayers, I enforce the lie that God desires prayers that are formal and articulate rather than personal and sincere.  My actions tell people that they are unable to pray.  For shame!  When I pray formally it is certainly not for God, rather for show and the institution. I need to pray simply, intimately, lovingly, personally, and sincerely—he’s my Dad after all—so that others may know that they are able to talk with Him as well.

Keith, a friend who often joins us at Culpeper House for Wednesday dinners, shared a wonderful post by one of his previous pastors.  It’s a damning critique of the institutional church:

“Someone somewhere along the line got the idea of putting on a ‘play’ for people and calling it church.”

Take a moment to read “What I think of Church”

A few weeks ago I applied for a job with a local church (I know shocking).  More about that later.  At the suggestion of the guy who disciples me, I provided them a personal Philosophy of Ministry.  I thought it might be cool to share it.

In my interactions with people, I most often impart the love that Jesus has for his own people, stirring people up to love one another and to become connected in relationships with one another.  My calling is to the Church, helping people develop authentic, deep relationships of great love with God and with one another where they have freedom to seek after Him with reckless abandon, that is disciple-making.  I desire for people to come alive in their relationship with God—for Him to be the tangible and core reason for being and doing and the ultimate decision maker in their lives.  Often this requires people to leave the control, safety, success, and comfort they perceive themselves as having and simply trust what God has told/shown them to do.  This can only happen when people have a deep and abiding knowledge that they are children of God and that, as such, He loves them and desires for their best.  Having been loved and liberated by Christ, people gain freedom to reveal the sin and brokenness that afflicts them that they may be healed and set free to go and love more and more like Him—self-sacrificially.  As they love more and more like God, God uses them to make disciples and thus the Kingdom grows.

So practically, what does that look like?  For me it looks like (and I’m far from perfect at it):

• listening
• praying
• seeking to actively love all I come into contact/surrounding them with love
• sharing meals with people in groups and individually
• spending time with people one-on-one
• coming to relationships with the understanding that we both have things to teach one-another
• hearing people’s passions and connecting them with people of similar passions
• being available to people
• helping people discover/understand their spiritual gifts and helping them learn to use them
• helping people understand that they worship a God who speaks and learn to recognize and obey His voice
• helping people to allow faith to guide their actions/make God the decision-maker in their life (moving from belief in God’s existence to faith in God’s promises/identity)
• listening to the Holy Spirit and allowing Him to guide my conversations
• seeking to learn and grow each and every day
• seeking to chase after God with reckless abandon myself, making Him the decision-maker in my life
• being “discipled” myself
• living and functioning in community
• walking alongside people on their journey/getting on their sinking ships with them and helping them plug the hole instead of simply bailing out the water

Unfortunately, disciple-making is a messy, time-consuming, labor-intensive process that requires depth of relationship to be developed and, as such, is impossible to do in mass or quickly. The good news however is that, as people become disciples, the Holy Spirit will equip them and provide them opportunities to make disciples themselves… thus the Kingdom grows both exponentially and with power.

Jan at Church for Starving Artists wrote yesterday about the need to hear one another’s stories in building authentic community.

Sharing our stories is so important. 

I’ve found it the best foundation to lay for any group whether a missions team, intentional Christian community, or sunday gathering.

It enables us to love one another so much better.  Suddenly I have a glimpse into why Susan does all those things that drive me nuts and it’s not so bad any more. I’m able to sit in silence less awkwardly becaue I now know why John never speaks. Knowing how Jim grew up affords me more grace when he snaps at me.

A practical suggestion, having done this quite a few times by this point, is to have someone who is willing to be particularly vulnerable go first and set the tone.  It’s also good to encourage everyone to have a turn, sharing only what (and if) they are comfortable, taking particular care to value however much or little is shared.  It can take people a really long time to share their story, so I’ve found, if it’s a small group, taking a weekend retreat with the primary purpose of hearing everyone’s story makes it actually less arduous and forms a great foundation for authentic Christian community.