Confession—I recently went to the zoo on a Sunday morning.
It was…fantastic. I admired a baby orangutan. I discussed Harry Potter loudly by the cobra cage (you’re welcome, children). I snacked so aggressively that I left a popcorn trail behind me. To be honest, it was a lot more fun than your average morning at church. Given the line outside the gate at opening, I suspect I’m not the first to discover this.
A lot of people in my life, Jesus-followers included, don’t regularly connect with a local church anymore. For the most part, their reasons aren’t scandals or trauma or even deep skepticism. They didn’t make some grand decision to leave. They are just busy. Tired. Bored. The zoo is fun. Church often isn’t. And pontificating preachers aren’t the only problem. The relationships themselves are often messy, annoying, inconvenient, and fraught with conflict. It’s easier to hang around strangers by the penguins pen.
I think about this a lot. Church is hard. Any form of committed community is hard. You know what’s not hard? Scrolling your phone in bed with your dog. Brunch with the 3-5 people on planet earth that you actually really like. So why do it? Why keep showing up to spend time around people with whom you have little in common, who will invade your space, stress you out, step on your toes, hurt your feelings, sing off-key in your ear, and regularly offend your moral sensibilities with their obviously wrong opinions?
As a pontificating preacher myself, I probably could offer a long, densely theological and deeply spiritual answer to the question, “Why the church?” However, what has been striking me recently is the simple, profound realization that the very things I dislike most about being in community are probably the most important things that I gain from being part of it.
I don’t like having my task-flow interrupted or my personal space invaded. I really don’t like when people move around my perfectly organized office supplies. But it turns out I am healthier when people regularly impose themselves in my space. I might be more frequently annoyed. But I’m also less lonely, less anxious, less prone to depression, generally more psychologically well, even more productive.
I hate conflict. This, to me, is the worst part of community—where people cluster, so do arguments. But committing to community is what is forcing me to grow up, to confront my patterns of avoidance, to recognize and own my flaws and insecurities, to hold more grace for other people, and to root my identity more securely in God’s opinion of me.
I get bored easily. Given the option, I’d probably wear AirPods all day, consuming an endless stream of political analysis and astrophysics lectures. But in community I am confronted with the presence of genuine others who have their own stories, their own interests, their own inherent dignity and worth. Every day provides a new chance to surrender my appetite for endless stimulation and to practice seeing, really seeing, people whom God loves.
I get frustrated talking to people who are vastly different from me, whose perspectives and postures I find quite off the mark. These encounters often make me angry. But they are also making me wiser. From these people I have learned so much about God, about my own blind spots, about the complexity of the world and what it means to be human.
The zoo is awesome. But showing up there does not generally make me wiser, humbler, or holier. It does not make me more gracious, more patient, more differentiated, more deeply attentive to the full and complex image of God. Showing up regularly to the challenges of real community…does.
