“It doesn’t look like a church,” five-year old Katy said this to her pastor- father as he pointed out a nice, traditional New England-style church with red brick and four white columns out front. You see, Katy’s dad was the pastor of a new church start-up that was meeting in their basement. They had been meeting in the basement for half of Katy’s life and were making plans to build a building of their own. Katy’s dad had been scouting out possible designs for the new building.
For those two and a half years her father had been meeting people in the community and inviting them to the new “church.” He had been preaching and teaching through Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles to follow and learn from the founders of our faith. He wanted to take them back to the basics of the Christian faith and in a sense to make this church a new beginning for the followers of Jesus in this community.
For about a year now the teens that came had begun affectionately calling their basement-church “The Church of the Catacombs.” They sensed a primitive, simple, and compelling story that they were living out twenty centuries later, but still connected to the original Christians.
For twenty centuries the followers of Jesus have worshiped in groves of trees, in caves, in homes, and in prisons. The place and décor isn’t what defines worship; it’s the person we worship that defines our worship. And it’s that indefinable something that takes place when Jesus is worshiped that makes any place a place of worship.
This month we will celebrate the life, death, and resurrection of the object of our worship, Jesus. It’s the Spirit of Jesus present with us when we gather that makes this place a place of worship. It’s the spirit that we bring with us when we gather that determines how we look at the place where we worship and the people that we worship with.
May the Spirit of the Risen Jesus be with us this month and every month as we gather to worship Him, whether or not we think our building looks like a church.
