| <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n My wife, Amy, and I have been in Pueblo for nearly three years, trying to grow a new church. Had we known how hard it would be, we might have opted for an existing ministry. Starting a new church is one of the most emotionally volatile experiences we can imagine.<\/p>\n It\u0092s easy to get hung up on the number of people who show up on any given Sunday. It\u0092s hard not to take it personally when someone says they will come, and then they don\u0092t. That, or they come once every few months and consider themselves regulars. Both of these scenarios happen all of the time.<\/p>\n We\u0092ve heard nearly every excuse for not coming to church that could be imagined, to the point that we don\u0092t hear them anymore. We believe we have something to share that\u0092s worth people\u0092s time, but we can\u0092t make them do anything.<\/p>\n Some people said they really wanted to come, but that meeting in our home where we originally began was too intimate for them. When we moved to the college they still didn\u0092t come. Some who felt the CSU-Pueblo campus was too far away hedged. We\u0092re now located on the southwest side of town, and they still don\u0092t come. Dozens of people said they\u0092d come if we had services in the morning, so last week we had our first morning worship. None of the new people came.<\/p>\n Why should they, after all?<\/p>\n There\u0092s a growing perception that faith can happen in a vacuum, that we don\u0092t need community to nurture our connection with God. As Amy said in a recent sermon, many people find their spiritual nourishment on a mountaintop, in a book or by the ocean. While these things are useful and perhaps even inspiring, when you need an ear to listen or a shoulder to lean on, a book is no consolation.<\/p>\n No matter how much you love the divine creation of the outdoors, a mountain just can\u0092t love you back.<\/p>\n Author Anne Lamott concedes that she makes her 14-year-old son go to church. She says it\u0092s one of the only places she knows of where he can see people loving God back.<\/p>\n We learn about our spiritual ancestry by learning from the wisdom of others. We understand compassion and humility by seeing it modeled. We can\u0092t learn the value of a community of faith if we\u0092re so isolated that we never take the risk of sharing what we believe.<\/p>\n Church can really suck. I\u0092ve been hurt by church, as have many people, but this is no excuse for walking away. We don\u0092t abandon our families simply because we have hard times, do we? Do we quit our job every time we experience conflict? Maybe some people do both of these, but it\u0092s a sign of one\u0092s character to see how they respond to hardship. Do you withdraw, or do you allow yourself to be vulnerable?<\/p>\n No one has to go to church, though some churches are based upon the very opposite precept. Somehow they have a corner on salvation, and without them, you\u0092re outside the circle. Lamott\u0092s response: Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell, and faith is for people who have been there.<\/p>\n Fear is a terrible reason to go to church. As Lamott says, we\u0092ve all been through hell, in one form or another. Still, we feel like we shouldn\u0092t burden other people with our problems. In an increasingly do-it-yourself society, a communal approach to healing is hard to comprehend, let alone embrace. It\u0092s risky, scary and will demand more from us than sitting on our butts, thinking up reasons not to go.<\/p>\n Church isn\u0092t about getting a weekly dose of religion. It\u0092s about realizing faith by living it together. You\u0092ve been through enough. It\u0092s time to stop thinking of reasons why you don\u0092t deserve to be loved, for God\u0092s sake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is life like hell without faith? My wife, Amy, and I have been in Pueblo for nearly three years, trying to grow a new church. Had we known how hard it would be, we might have opted for an existing ministry. Starting a new church is one of the most emotionally volatile experiences we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |