My Dear Watson

"This is a great mystery, and I take it to mean Christ and the Church."

Ephesians 5:32

Thinking back to my teenage years, I can honestly credit my home church for helping make me the person I am today. And I'm not even sure if they knew they were doing it.

Now, did I always want to go? Sit through another sermon? Pray yet again? Well, no. And even when I did go, my motives weren't always the most pious.

You see, there was a pretty girl. There were good friends. There were fun youth group activities.

And yet.

Even though I didn't know what was happening, I was growing. Becoming older. Learning from God. Learning about relationships--with God, with my peers, with pastors and older people who I might have never otherwise come into contact with.

God was doing His work in those days. Molding me into something. Protecting me from myself and the dangers that surrounded me. Showing me what the true Church was really all about. And it wasn't something that anyone forced. It was God.

When I think today about the young people I pastor, I want God to shelter them and help them grow in the same way. I want us all to be bound to each other...not because we would have become friends anyway, but because God holds each of us tight in His arms, binding us together for His purposes.

Perhaps through this we will all begin to realize what "church" is supposed to be.

It's not a building...but it happens there. It's not a pastor preaching a sermon...but God does speak there. It's not a bunch of people spending time together...but it is God at work in the midst of gathered individuals, helping them become a community seeking to spread God's message of love to a world whose experience of relationships is often hollow and disjointed.

Without God working through the fragile fellowship of my own home church, I would not be where I am today. I know this. So tight were the bonds He formed in our midst that I still have friends from those days and will always credit those years as foundational for everything that came after. And I know that God's work in the Church is not done yet.

How does it happen? I can only point to God.

Sure, it's a mystery...but I'd be lost without it.