Church as it should be

Sunday night, we celebrated our last living room church service! Starting this weekend (Oct. 22nd) we will be meeting at Pickles Restaurant in town. We decided to have a BBQ to make things more festive (and because Joe Daniels makes the best pork chops in the world). The whole evening was fantastic. Joe came over early with his son and a friend of his. I sat in the back yard with this guy while he smoked a couple cigarettes talking about fishing and churches that meet in living rooms. Our whole group was there, milling around the house, kids running rampant, eating, laughing and generally enjoying themselves. My favorite moment was sitting next to my neighbor, Dana--each of us with a pork chop in one hand and a beer in the other--when it dawned on him that he was at church. "What kind of church did you say this was?" I will never get tired of answering that question! There really is nothing as inspiring or worshipful to me as hanging out with a group of friends, eating a good meal, talking about what God has done, and worshipping together. It didn't feel like "Christian" fun, either--you know, where you get the feeling that this BBQ is the most exciting thing anyone has done outside the Fellowship Hall in years and people use words like "fellowship" and the men and women don't sit next to eachother. We are not a polished group of people. There are some tough things going on in the lives of my friends (two people had actually got into car accidents on the way to our house!)--but we all know about it. We talk about it, and help eachother--we have hugs and crying at our BBQs to go with the laughter. Toward the end of the evening, I overheard the smoking kid from the beginning of the evening trying to articulate to Joe how he couldn't help but sing along with worship--he couldn't find the words to describe the fact that he had just worshipped the God of the universe for the first time in his life!

Pickles will be fun--a good place to meet that will seat more people than my living room. I only hope we are able to maintain that sense of family and worship I felt so intensely on Sunday night. I am literally desperate for more messed up people in this town to find us out so they can experience what we are so blessed to live with.