Church

This morning, Michelle, Toby and I went to church, maybe because very soon we won't be able to for many months. We probably shouldn't even now; the risk of Toby catching something from a roomful of other toddlers is higher than we'd like. But we really wanted to.

Perhaps a warning before I continue. Not a warning, more of a clarification. A caveat? Commentary?

This blog now has readers from every circle of social interaction that Michelle or I have ever passed through, not to mention those of our parents, our friends, our parents' friends and our friends' parents, and many other random connections unremembered. People we don't know read it. People whom no one we know knows read it. (It does so make sense...read it again.)

Anyway, a long time ago nearly everybody who read this blog was a friend of ours through church, unless they were related to us. So I really want to write about our church, at the risk of alienating our newer readers. Feel free to skip down to the pictures if I start to bore you.

Okay, clariveatary over. So this morning we went to the Church of the Open Door in Maple Grove. This is going to be our church. Word has gotten around somewhat, but if you haven't heard it from us yet, we have left Solomon's Porch. And we should really talk about this.

Not about why or who's to blame or what needs to be fixed. We're trying to get past that and we aren't taking any hurt feelings or resentment with us. I should talk about the why for those of you who are wondering, but I'll try to be brief. You can read this post if you'd like a glimpse of some of our past frustrations with Solomon's Porch's philosophy of child care. In a nutshell, the Porch provides child care for a portion of the gathering, but not the full duration. This is an intentional choice on their part, and we admire our church for being intentional about the way children are included in the church. Unfortunately, the arrangement was unworkable for us.

By the way, Michelle and I laid the whole thing out in a two-page letter to the church. If you want the whole story, I'll send you a copy.

So that's the deal, but what we really need to say is how irrevocably in love we are with the SP community in general, and so many of you in particular. There's no way you won't still be entrenched in our lives. Many of you we saw more out of church than in anyway. You've meant so much to us for five years, but especially these last four months as we went through the most earthshaking and faithshaking event of our lives. The hospital visits, the meals, the calls, the tears, the prayers...we've thanked you and thanked you and it will never feel like we've thanked you enough. But we know we're not leaving that. This church has showed us what Christian community is supposed to look like, and there's no leaving a Christian community. There's only leaving a church service.

So it is that that we do, with, it must be said, considerable relief and expectation. Please understand that this feels right to us and we are glad to have made the decision at last. Yes, we were probably feeling a need to shed extraneous stress from our lives at this point, and it's too bad that our church was a source of stress, but that's not why. It's time to move on.

As I write about a wonderful, loving community, I struggle with whether I should say this, but give me a little license, I was there for over five years. I was deeply saddened, or more accurately, disgusted, to hear about how Victor was treated during his nomination to the Leadership Co-op. I do wish I had been there to support him. I'm glad he is now part of your Leadership, and I hope the church as an entity learns and grows from what happened. Okay I'm done.

God bless.