Where two or three are gathered…

I have been pondering a couple of “church lines” for about a day.  One is Matthew 18:20: For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.  The other is one of the prefaces to several of the Affirmations of Faith in The United Methodist Hymnal and its predecessors: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is the one true church, apostolic and universal, whose holy faith let us now declare."

I wish I could say that I had been meditating on deep spiritual truth – and maybe I have in ways that I do not yet comprehend.  But the starting place for all this is a bit mundane.  The sewer system in the main building of our church backed up over the weekend.  A want of convenience and hygiene drove us out of that facility.  So, we rather hurriedly set up some folding chairs and a makeshift worship center in our Family Life building and “did church” there.

Several people remarked upon the novelty of the day.  Some even thought that the arrangement had something to recommend it.  (Though I wonder how long we would be happy with hard steel folding chairs after we have gotten used to padded pews.)

I think we’ll be back in our regular space next Sunday.  But this was a graphic reminder that “We are the church.”  It doesn’t take a lot of accoutrements to make that point.