Being the Church without the church…

As most of you know, we signed a lease on a building in downtown Nashville almost 2 months ago, and were scheduled to occupy that space on May 1st. Well, May 1st has come and gone and we’re still waiting for renovations to be completed on the building we’re leasing, and I have to say that, as hard as I was trying not to, I was starting to get a little frustrated.

Then early last week, God really started talking to me about some stuff. When the Emmaus Church began 8 weeks prior, we set out to do church differently than most other churches we knew… and only 8 weeks into that journey, we were starting to look a lot like the churches we felt like had missed the point. Furthermore, I began to feel like God was holding up the renovations and thus keeping us out of our new facility because we were thinking we couldn’t be a church without a building… I felt like God said, “You be the Church, and then you can have the building.”

So… this past Sunday we bought 100 boxed lunches from Blimpies Subs, loaded them into the back of Nana’s pickup truck and started driving out into the community around the church. (There will be pics up soon!) Whenever we found someone, we just asked them if they’d had lunch yet and handed them a box. We never mentioned the church, we just smiled and said things like, “Happy Fathers Day, God bless you.”

It was really one of the most profound experiences we’ve had as a group of believers to date. The Emmaus church has been learning a lot over the last several months, a lot about what we’re called to do and what we’re called to be. And we’ve been trying to figure out how to go about being the church. Yesterday, we saw something amazing, we saw the Kingdom of God begin to rise up in the community all around us, and we fell in love with it.

~ by Michael on June 18, 2007.