We had a Super Bowl party last night with a big group of folks from our church at a church member's home. There must have been 40-50 people in the house (it was a big house). In the midst of the chaos and mayhem of a group of adults yelling and watching the game upstairs and a group of kids yelling and playing downstairs, I was taught a valuable lesson. Before I share that lesson, I need to fill you in on some background.
Two months ago my wife and I picked up the newest addition to our family from an orphanage in Bulgaria. His name is Viktor and he's 6-years old. Vikki, as we call him, is still learning English and there are many things about his new life that he hasn't figured out. The rest of the family (along with my wife and I, our 12-year old son and 9-year old daughter) spends a lot of time correcting him and trying in our broken Bulgarian and his broken English to explain things to him. One thing that he didn't understand when we picked him was the concept of church.
For the first couple of weeks that he was home, we didn't take him to church. He was still new and we were trying to ease him into his new life and we were afraid he would be overwhelmed with all the new people and things at church. As the pastor, I couldn't miss, so mom stayed home with Vikki and I tried to tell where I was going when I left. I always used the Bulgarian word for church but he thought I was saying food (in Bulgarian the words for church and food are very similar). After a few times I realized, he doesn't know what church is. In fact he may have never even been to church, after all he had lived his entire life in a state-run orphanage so his never having been in church wasn't impossible.
After a few weeks we finally took Vikki to church and he really enjoyed it and did well. As a 6-year old in the nursery, what's not to love about church? New toys, new friends, new places. He quickly decided that he really liked going to church. But his understanding of church was different than mine and at the Super Bowl party he reminded me of something I had forgotten.
In America, we forget that the church isn't a building or a weekly event. We forget that the church is a people. At the party Viktor kept calling what we were doing "church". The rest of us kept telling him, "No, this isn't church," when all of a sudden I realized, "Wait! He's right! This is church!" This is a group of people who love each other, are committed to each other and have decided to share life together. This little orphan boy from Bulgaria who had never experienced church before has figured out in only about a month that church is people! It's not a building, it's not an event, it's people.
I think many of us need to see the church through fresh eyes again. The old saying is true, "Familiarity breeds contempt." Many of us have lost sight of the fact that the church is people and if we keep that our priority we do much better in how we treat visitors, in our passion to reach the lost, and in our desire to see people grow in maturity as they follow Christ. I'm sure my little boy didn't understand all that he was saying, but God used his innocent confusion to help remind me of a very important truth. The church is people!
