Addressing The Deep Longings in Congregations

by Mark Tidsworth, Team Leader

Two Deep Longings

It’s obvious when disciples are first able to gather for in-person worship, small groups, or missional activities. You can see them fighting with the intense urge to bear hug everyone there, like survivors whose life rafts just set them ashore and into the arms of family. We all feel it…that longing to be with our people again. Since this thing has gone on so long now, there’s an intense ache deep in our bones. We long for reconnection with the body of Christ, our local expression of the Jesus Tribe.

Right alongside this longing for community is the clear longing for new and emerging forms of church. If it’s taught us anything, we have learned that our way of being church before all this was quite limited. Crises will do that you know; pulling back the layers to illuminate our weaknesses. Though we are fond of saying, “the church is not the building, it’s the people,” we now recognize how campus-dependent we were. When we couldn’t meet there we felt lost, like wilderness wanderers without direction. Now many of us are weaned off campus-dependency and are ready for less-campus-dependent-church. In fact, many of us are ready for even more than that. Many of us recognize our need for more vitalized forms or expressions of church in order to sustain ourselves as Jesus-followers in the world as we know it. We are longing for less-campus-dependent, more accessible and vitalized churches.

We carry deep longings for reconnection with the body of Christ in our local contexts while also deeply longing for more vitalized expressions of church.

Snap-Back Assumptions

Here’s the thing though. Many in churches assume that the way to address our deep longing for reconnection is to return to our former expression of church; doing church in the familiar ways to which we were accustomed before life disruption descended upon us. Since our lives are turned upside down, our internal drivers are screaming for something familiar. No surprises, with minimal reflection. Of course we long for the familiar during extreme life disruption.

This scares many church leaders. Their ears hear strong resistance to transformation in the longing to reconnect. They recognize many in their congregations carry the assumption that returning to what was is THE ONLY way to reconnect.

This is where church leaders can intercede. They can detach the deep longing for reconnection from the assumed methodology for addressing this need. Rather than shaming disciples or denying the need for reconnection, church leaders can recognize and affirm this natural human need, followed by two different ways for reconnecting.

Two Approaches For Addressing the Deep Longing

First, we can address the deep longing for reconnection through our faith. What is it in our faith that we KNOW beyond the shadow of a doubt? What do we KNOW in our faith which sustains us while traveling in the wilderness? This is the essence of our faith which reconnects us to God and one another.

Second, let’s reconnect our people as the body of Christ in our local settings, satisfying this deep longing we carry. We need to know we ARE church together, come what may. We’ve always be the church gathered and scattered. Though scattered more often now, we can reconnect with each other in new and interesting ways. Churches everywhere are engaging holy experiments toward gathering in strange and intriguing ways and places. We ARE church, come what may.

So, we go forward in faith, hope, and love. We go forward with courage, unafraid of the powerful longings rising in this body of Christ. May we live into God’s hopes and dreams for church-as-it-is-becoming here in 2020.

NOTE: For more on reconnecting, see Chapter Three in Mark’s book ReShape: Emerging Church Practice In A Volatile World and come join us in the ReShape Seminar starting in January.