I FOUND CHURCH

I experienced church in Hawaii. In 2013 and 2014 Christine and I joined teams of Habitat for Humanity volunteers led by Alan Kotanen. Alan is a gentle man with a winsome temperament. He is sensitively relational. His personal relationship with God is attractive. Because he is also confident, energetic, organized, and informed, and because he is married to Sylvia who matches him with complimentary strengths, Christine and I signed on.

Our teams were approximately 15 and 16 members, each of whom shelled out money for flights, food and accommodation arranged by Alan for an experience that included one week of hard work and a few days of touristy leisure. We ate meals together, commuted to a work site and worked together, shared tasks of food prep and cleanup, and we had a daily post supper gathering for a couple of hours. We laughed a lot and we spoke seriously about life. In those meetings Alan softly coaxed us to debrief our day. The bonding of lives happened within the first 48 hours and deepened, evoking a freedom and willingness to be real, honest, and vulnerable. We listened eagerly, expressed personal impressions, voiced needs, invited prayer, reveled in good news, shared scripture, had fun and occasionally sang. We played games together, sunned together, sweated together, walked in conversation with one another, came to know one another.

In these past two years, that has been the experience of Christ's church that has come closest to my understanding of the church in the book of ACTS, closest to my expectations and preferences of church as I want it to be for me. There was responsibility and accountability and organization in this little society but the rules were minimal, sensible, and owned by all. Leadership was acknowledged, applied with humility and poise, delegated and shared. Both men and women, young and senior exercised their giftedness to benefit the group outcomes. During our workdays, we let our 'spiritual light' shine to non-team workers, to Habitat personnel, to prospective homeowners. Gospel and faith and hope were charmingly communicated.

I won't dissect this further in order to develop a formulaic result, a template. I won't err by romanticizing this energy. I know only that the number of people, the intimacy, the mission and purpose, the leadership, the disposition to be known and to know others, generated love for one another. I have no idea whether those dynamics could be sustained for 6 months or ten years. I am sure that as member eccentricities, foibles, faults and, paranoias surfaced, the love would be stretched and the grace of Christ be necessitated. I suspect that doubling or quadrupling the membership would make this soup watery. But God is creative and his Spirit can teach us how to add corn starch to thicken the broth so the higher percentage are engaged and growing. Do you agree?