"Give us grace in our changing day
to stand by the temple that is the present church,
the noisesome temple
the sometimes scandalised temple that is the present
church,
listening sometimes to what again seems mumbo jumbo.
Make it our custom to go
till the new outline of your Body for our day
becomes visible in our midst."

~George Macleod, founder of modern-day Iona Community

I have spent my entire life in the church. Unlike many of my peers, I never rebelled against it, never thought it was irrelevant. Even in college, a time when most young adults have other things to do like sleep in mostly, I went to church with some regularity. To my friends this made me interesting or simply odd, depending on their own experience of this fragile institution. In some ways, that same perception could still be true. Many of my neighbors and friends do not attend church. They don't see its relevance or are so overcome by its perceived hypocrisy that they wouldn't darken the doors.

Churches are institutions like any other…full of frail humans, muddling through what it means to create any kind of life together, developing systems that can work miracles or great injustice, declaring belief that might encompass all involved but rarely does. The church at this point in the history of the world seems to be particularly fragile. Most mainline denominations are dwindling. Generations are trying to figure out how to work and worship side-by-side with one another, finding relevance and the Holy together in one place. Many communities are simply trying to find ways to maintain the aging and expensive buildings they have come to call home in troubled economic times.The whole situation gives one pause and lots of fuel for prayer.

Just down the street from my office my Lutheran brothers and sisters are meeting to decide what it means to them to be church. They are voting and praying and, you can bet,singing and voting and praying some more. Certainly they carry with them the fragility of inheritance and a fervent hope for the future. What is the church to be in the next decade? How will we all live together in love and mutual respect? Where is the voice of God heard in our time? How are we then so to behave and believe?

From church history I know these are not new questions or struggles. And I suspect they will be lived out over and over again in the next decades as people, hopeful people, try to once again understand the movement of the Holy in their time. That is why I continue to stay in love with this broken yet blessed institution. It is the one place where I can come together with others as fragile as myself to keep my eyes and heart open to the One who breathed us all into being. And every now and then, together, we get a glimpse of what it means to live in the presence, the beautiful presence, of God.

At this moment I am sending my prayers toward the gathered Lutherans…….blessed be.