By CAL BEVERLY
Publisher

If you go to church, or once attended a church and don't anymore, or wish you could find one worth going to, this column is a tremulous attempt at mutual communication.

Those of you who think the very subject is a waste of your time check back later. Maybe life will have changed your mind.

I'm cribbing from an elder's sermon notes, but the theme, I think, runs deeply through most of us, whatever the name on the front of the building we on occasion enter.

The issue is this: Why aren't we together even in our own little groups and what can we do to get together?

Murray Bradfield raised the question Sunday, posing it as a series of "opposing" pairs. Are we as Christians living more on one side or the other; are we more oriented toward:

Meeting vs. doing (or being).

Duty vs. desire.

Artificial vs. genuine.

Isolation vs. companionship.

Segmentation vs. central feature.

Superficiality vs. communion (sharing significant life together).

Individualism vs. collectivism.

Put another way, Murray asked, do I construe my identity as individual or corporate?

Then he challenged the little group meeting at 11 a.m. in what we call "our church," What do the leaders need to do to make things better? And, bringing it home to each pew-sitter, what can I do to make it better?

With apologies to Murray, I launch out on my own here. Don't hold him responsible.

I firmly believe that God in his Word who is Jesus has all the answers we need. But, seems to me, we muddle through life for the most part never getting around to asking the right questions.

You judge whether what follows might be some of the "right" ones, based on your own experience. I'm not claiming superior wisdom here; just a growing sense of need for what seems to be missing.

Suppose your child is injured seriously in a wreck. Who in your church will come and sit with you at the hospital while you wait to see if she will live? Who will pray with you there in the hallway, weep with you, be quiet with you, touch you on the shoulder, or hold your hand?

At home, who will see to it that meals are provided, chores attended, other kids cared for?

Look out across your congregation. Who among them knows what kinds of hell you are going through? Who would care care enough, that is, to spend time with you, without trying to come up with all the answers?

And if you don't know many, how many do those strangers on the other rows know themselves, in their hours of desperation and loneliness? Could they count on you?

Jesus said (paraphrasing), Here's how the world will know this is the real thing they'll see you loving each other, like a family, no matter what the circumstances, no matter your personal flaws.

With whom would you dare be honest? Who would dare be honest with you? To whom could you possibly confess all your sins? Jesus said, speak the truth in love and bear one another's burdens. Encourage one another, forbear one another, forgive one another.

Is that happening where you are?

Mostly our church groups are meeting-oriented, things we do out of duty rather than a heartfelt desire. There is mostly artifice and facade-maintaining, rather than genuineness.

We live isolated from one another, who are called brothers and sisters. Church fellowship is more likely a one-day-a-week thing, and the rest of the time, we do what we consider to be the more important or pressing things jobs, kids to soccer practice, tune up the pickup, tee time at 2, life.

Church-going is more an exercise in superficiality each of us with our Sunday masks firmly anchored. How are you? I'm fine. (Well, really, my oldest is on drugs, and my spouse is spending more time away from me than with me, and I don't know what the biopsy will tell about this lump in my chest.) But, yeah, everything's just great. Business is good. First hymn is on page 101. See you next Sunday. (And don't ask me to serve on that committee. I'm too busy as it is.)

We are American individualists, self-sufficient even if it kills us. Who needs those other jerks?

Well, I do.

Granted, my life circumstances may skew my perspective divorced, middle-aged, children grown and gone to their own lives, empty house with pictures of the past on the walls.

Am I really any more alone than you sometimes feel, even in the midst of a crowd? Maybe we share some equally isolated moments of lonely despair, but share them apart, unknown to the other, Robinson Crusoes stranded on our own individually constructed desert isles separated by vast seas of mostly meaningless busy-ness.

That's what happens to individuals, I believe. That's why our hearts cry out desperately for corporate body-life identity, for connectedness to a family my family, our family.

That's what Church is supposed to be a place of family for those who are otherwise aliens in a strange land, cut off from shared lives.

God sets the solitary in families, Proverbs says. Jesus says, You are adopted into My family; you and I have the same Father, and He loves both of us. My Church is to be the expression of that adoption, of that eternal family bond. And when the rest of the world those lost and lonely aliens like yourself sees what you have been given, they will want it for themselves. And it's available. You only have to ask.

There's not enough of that family life going on in most of our churches right now. Seems to me, God would have us experience more of His family life, together.

There's something happening in Fayette County these days (and many other places as well). People from very different church groups are getting together to respond to something deep in their hearts the cry of family.

They are meeting in storefronts and church buildings and each other's homes to pray that God break down the walls between individuals and between individual churches and individual denominations so that our family can begin coming together.

Baptist and Assembly of God and Lutheran and Episcopal and Catholic, black, brown, white and multi-colored folks are meeting one another outside the old frameworks of division and discovering that, with Jesus as Lord, we're all in this together. We're all family under the one banner of Christ.

May we start behaving like we are kin to one another?

Law builds institutions and schedules dutiful meetings. Grace breaks bread at the family supper table and shares the joys and troubles of the day, together.

More than just about anything, I want to be a part of more family suppers, where my brothers and sisters eat and laugh and cry together, and our Father smiles with approval.

Don't you?