Here Is the Church

and here are the people, open the doors and just go in for pity's sake

Woke up to the horror of Lucy, the ancient and demented Cat, peeing at the end of my bed. Seriously hoping that this doesn’t portend anything of significance, other than me dragging my mattress downstairs again. I will do that and run around trying to make sure the kids are all squared away and I haven’t forgotten my passport because, if you feel like praying, tomorrow morning Matt and I are flying to Paris for un petit voyage around the French countryside in celebration of my parents’ wedding anniversary. We should be able to get out of the city just before the Paralympics begin, whichever day that is I can’t remember, and perhaps make it as far as Geneva before coming back home again. I’ll be blogging along the way, and Matt will be taking copious numbers of pictures, and hopefully, we’ll all be consuming untoward amounts of cheese.

Anyway, so far our ‘vacances’ have been pretty great, the highlight being the two churches we’ve visited as part of our four Sundays off for the year. When your whole life is the church, the metric you use to judge all the stats and news is your own sense of health about your congregation. When some new poll comes out explaining that only 3 percent of Evangelicals know what the word “Trinity” means, or that the American public thinks that same-sex mirage is basically a Christian virtue, you look around in your mind’s eye at the people staggering through the doors of your local ecclesial Body and either feel really happy because the people are, astonishingly, Christian, or you put your head in your hands because it’s a bonfire of the vanities.

It is in that spirit of anxiety that I always feel a full measure of trepidation every Sunday when I climb on the internet to admonish the wide world to go to church. Not every Christian in the world can move to Binghmaton to come to my church, though I wish they would. What happens if you live in another town? Or don’t want to be Anglican (perish the thought)? Or have been going to a church your whole life that suddenly descends into spiritual chaos? Are there any reasonable churches for people to go to? Have they all closed? Are they all being made into mosques or outfitted for rich people to live in?