Love Big, Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church

I read this book because our denominational magazine, The Banner, reviewed and recommended it as a useful book about "the church in the world today." Our church has gotten quite small, and I have been praying, thinking, and reading about ways that I can possibly serve our church family and help to keep and make it a vital part of God's kingdom on earth.

This book is a fictional collection of letters between a pastor of a small-town church and its members. I did find parts of it meaningful to me and my own faith, but I don't quite see much helpful as far as building community and revitalizing a church like ours. All our members are spread throughout the Bay Area, miles from the church, many members travel a lot for business, it's very common for people to move in and out through the years, and nearly all our members either work full-time or are elderly. Mainly I felt like it did not speak well to a church like ours in a large city. Of course, that's to be expected when the title itself says it's about a "small-town church."

I liked many parts of the book, though. One was this:

As the church, we are the people (whenever we live true to ourselves) who will welcome you in to this world, who will join you in marriage and in friendship, who will bless your coming and your going. We will pray for you to prosper and know love's depths even if you think our prayers are foolish or offered in vain, and we will mourn you when you leave us. We will bless the land and the nations we share, and we will grieve together through tragedy and heartache. We will celebrate, with you, everything beautiful and good, everything that comes from the hand of mercy. And then, when your days conclude, we will bury you. We will return you to the earth and pray God's kindness over you.

That is who we are. This is who I hope we will be.

That is the hope for our church, too. Even with people traveling a lot, moving in and out, and so on, my church has been this for me and my family, and I know that's true for many others. I thank God for the people of my church who are all this to me and mine. That's a big reason I want to try to serve it and keep it vital.

In another part of the book, the letter-writing pastor talks about "making something beautiful" out of the church.

We're not trying to manufacture an idyllic life or an idyllic church. We're trying to be friends with one another, to speak to one another as people who have actual names. ...Whenever someone asked what vision our church follows, what we're making of our vocations and our loves and our friendships and our families, we could say, "We're making something beautiful, to the best of our ability."

I like this for mentioning friendships. I think that's what makes our church beautiful -- friendships with each other and with Jesus. I'd like us to nurture those friendships.

I also like its mention of visions. I'm a little cynical about vision statements right now. It seems like whenever we come up with them, they're true, but I don't really see them as very valuable. They kind of remind me of the horoscopes you can read based on your Zodiac sign. I once suggested a friend read some other sign's horoscopes for a while and see if those weren't true as well. Lo and behold, they were! We can make a lot of statements about our church's vision, but they're usually true of many churches besides ours. That's not bad, but I'd rather see us expending our energy, prayers, and thoughts on building our relationships, our friendships.

The pastor in the book talks about this, too.

In all my years attending the church..., I had never before heard anyone say, Hey, you know what we're about? Friendship. This is remarkable since Jesus himself gave us the model of his own friendship with us to function as our guide: "My command is this: love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." The next time I find myself among a group of pastors debating the atonement and the precise rationale for Jesus' death, I'm going to say, "Jesus died because he's our friend." ...

It's the current rage to talk about creating community and being missional and pursuing incarnational ministry, but these well-intentioned notions somehow morph into lofty ideals or complicated strategies that inhibit us from simply being friends, being neighbors. ... We seek friendship. We desire and pray for friendship. We become a friend, and then we hope the other will become a friend to us as well....

What if we thought of ourselves in simpler terms: friends together in the Kingdom of God. We'd have much more patience with one another. We'd give each other a break. We'd follow Jesus' words in his sermon on the mount: Be easy on people. We'd laugh more often. ...

My brother has been talking a lot about friendship lately. I've been reading more about it, thinking and praying about it. Friendship is beautiful. A church full of friends is beautiful.