“A church is a group or people collapsing into God and collapsing into one another.”
~N. Gordon Cosby

This quote from a sermon given by N. Gordon Cosby was featured on a daily meditation that arrives in my email box in a similar way that Pause arrives in many of yours. When I read it, I laughed and nearly cried at the same moment. Laughed because it is so true at its deepest core message. Nearly cried because we rarely remember that this collapsing is what we are always doing. This is our work.

I have spent my life in the church. I have spent the majority of my professional life working in the church. From the time of my birth I had a place of residence in a wooden pew, nestled by both my mother and father and the rest of the faith community. Even in my college years, when many young adults found other ways to spend Sunday mornings, I was often in church. Over the last 27 odd years of my living, I have worked to create an environment in which people have the opportunity to collapse into God and into one other. Somedays there is an actual full bodied experience of this happening. Other days are messier and less complete.

I have a general belief that people show up at a church for many reasons. Out of duty. Because it is engrained in their bones to do so. Because they are searching for something larger than themselves and a way to connect. Others are looking for friendship or a circle of people whose reason for coming together is different than their work, school or social life. Almost always people are, at some deep level, looking for meaning…..theirs, the world’s, the scripture’s.

It is not new news that most mainline Christian churches are not filled to the brim in the way they were, say, in 1950. Many, most, struggle to make budgets that will support the buildings many faithful built in that flourishing decade or ones earlier. Many, most, try all manner of ways to stand on their heads to invite, coerce,nearly beg people to come into their doors. They, we, try with honest hearts to tell the story of how the Holy has moved through our lives. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail miserably.

Of course, given a world in which much of how we structure our lives is centered on an open market of supply and demand, there have been people who have turned the dwindling membership of the church into a business. We have church growth experts and conferences. We have books that can tell us the sure fire way to turn the tides of falling membership around. Many are boxed in slick, bright, eye-catching colors and promises and those of us in the ‘biz often flock to them. Money exchanges hands in hope and desperation. On both sides of the equation, people barter with the best intentions, in good faith.

The more I continue to make my life in the church, the more mysterious it all is to me. I have watched faith-filled people be a balm for one another in beautiful, compassionate ways. I have also been present to some down right hate-filled and painful encounters. In some ways it is a wonder that the church has existed as long as it has. When I watch words and dogma and even scripture be used to divide and exclude, it makes me question why we continue to try in all the ways we do to be what we call the church.

It is usually at just one of those moments,when it seems more sensible to walk away, that I am witness to someone collapsing. Collapsing into the grace of a holy moment, an outstretched hand or a whispered prayer. Collapsing into a hope that seemed unimaginable or a despair that could not be held alone. Collapsing into what someone can call God.

It seems to me that if we can hold onto this image of the vulnerability we all carry as we live our days, we might be able to get past all that keeps us from being church and from becoming the spiritual beings we were created to be. If we can all remember that being church is an on-going collapsing….into God….into one another….we all might worry a little less about growing, whatever that means, and more about holding on for dear life.