In the last edition of The Goodness I talked about otherness, about our identity as outsiders, people on the margins, the holy different. I said we shouldn’t try to centralize Christianity, to make ourselves the normal ones. I said we’ll flourish on the margins. I said, “I really do think this is the best future for the church.”
The first step, then, to becoming who God wants us to be is to embrace our identity as aliens, strangers and pilgrims, to live respectfully in a world that isn’t ours.
The second step is not at all like unto it. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.
The second step is belonging.
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The other night we had friends over to our apartment for dinner. It’s a borrowed apartment. The throw pillows, the mugs, the sheets—none of it’s ours. I cooked lasagna. The girls cleaned. Justin told stories and made us laugh. We watched the setting sun paint Table Mountain in first orange, then pink, then purple. It felt normal—in the way extraordinary things become ordinary over time. These friends of just a few weeks felt like real friends, old friends.
Some way through dinner, after the salad and before the dessert, the mountain painted peach, our friend Clint said to me, “Francesca read me your essay.” I smiled at his wife Francesca and waited for Clint to say something nice. He put his fist on the table: “You are not an outsider. You belong.”
A week before I’d watched my daughter curl up on Clint and Francesca’s couch with their dog. I have a picture of her sleeping there.
A few days after our dinner party the six of us would pile into a van and take a roadtrip to the coast.
At church on Sunday Francesca handed me a gift bag with a book we’d talked about. She’d written an inside joke on the first page.
If this isn’t belonging, what is?
And to what do I credit so much connection so quickly?
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Like I said in the last essay, I live in South Africa now. Just 28 years ago this country lived under the oppressive system of Apartheid, a system that said races should be separate with one race privileged over the other. I can see vestiges of that system when I walk down the street. Blacks eat in one restaurant, whites prefer the one beside it. Certain jobs seem exclusively done by blacks (Uber, grocery clerking, housekeeping), other jobs for whites. The very poor are overwhelmingly black.
But this is not what I see at church. Black and white lead worship. Black and white show up in pictures and in videos. Black and white attend youth group gatherings. Black and white lead youth group gatherings. Black and white host connect groups. Black and white (and many shades of brown) preach and pray and lead in roughly even numbers.
Why is it different here than it is on Kloof Street on a Friday night?
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My friend Steve lives in Croatia. He has friends in Ukraine from when he worked there as a missionary. When the war began, Steve began looking for ways to help. Every day he’s on Facebook asking for prayers for women and children fleeing to Croatia. He sits in government offices filling out forms in Croatian while texting in Russian and praying in English. Today his home is full of refugees, outsiders, aliens. They’re homeless, but they have a home. They belong with Steve—just like Steve belonged with them back when he was a young American stranger.
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There’s a reason bread is the symbol for the body of Christ. Recently I stumbled across The Didache; written sometime during the first 150 years of the Church, it’s a kind of handbook, a guide to Christian community. In it, the author prays,
As grain was scattered over the hills and then was brought together and made one, so let your Church be brought together from the ends of the earth into your Kingdom (9.4).
Bread—it’s what we get when we unite scattered things. We gather the wheat from the fields, individual stalks, and we grind it together, mix it together, bake it together. Together it becomes one united thing.
Paul writes in Ephesians 2:
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
Are we strangers and aliens? Yes. And no.
We’re strangers in this world, outsiders in a culture so different from our own. And we’re fellow citizens, family, in the household of God. We don’t belong and we do belong. And it’s that belonging, that being built together into a dwelling place for the Spirit of God, that enables us to face the embarrassment and fear and loneliness of not belonging in the world.
Christians can afford to be other in the world because they find such a strong sense of belonging, identity, and home in the church. And just as our willingness to be made least strengthens our witness to those far from God, our loving community, the family of God in which all God’s children find belonging, serves as a light to those who’re walking in lonely darkness.
Difference and belonging are the twin pillars of Christian witness.
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Let me ask you a question: Have you experienced belonging in the household of God?
My guess is you have and you haven’t. That makes sense given that God’s church is made up of people, people full of the Spirit welcoming, serving, and loving with supernatural generosity, and also people failing to be who God’s calling them to be (often these are the very same people).
Can we do better at making the church a place where everyone belongs? Yes. Only by the power of Christ.
And is the church a place where outsiders become insiders? Yes. Only by the power of Christ.
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What makes a person feel like she belongs? Think about the places where you feel welcome, like you’re at the very center of life and love—your family, your team, your marriage, your college sorority, your neighborhood… What links you to one another?
I think the answer is three fold:
We do the same things.
We love the same things.
We spend time together doing and loving the same things.
We’re overwhelmingly drawn to similarity, and maintained similarity keeps us together.
Is this true of the church? Is it true of my church in Cape Town, South Africa? It is.
What do we do? We pray and read Scripture. We’re kind to our neighbors. We worship. We share our resources. We’re respectful to our parents. We’re patient. We forgive. We only have sex with our spouse. We care for creation…
What do we love? We love God and one another and our neighbors.
Do we spend time together doing and loving the same things? We do. The rhythms of our lives are inextricably synced to the rhythms of the household of faith.
It’s not always like that. But it can be, always.
Hear me:
If you’re experiencing a lack of belonging with God’s people, it may be because you aren’t acting like God’s people.
It may be because you don’t love God or God’s people or your neighbor.
It may be because you don’t spend time with God’s people.
And it may be because the church community you’ve found isn’t composed of God’s people.
Belonging is found in Christ—so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others (Romans 12:5). If we love Christ first and identify first as Christ’s we will connect with others who do the same. If instead we love other things more than Christ or define ourselves primarily by markers of identity that are not Christ, we will struggle to connect with our brothers and sisters.
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I find it easy to be an outsider. I’m sure it has something to do with growing up in coastal, urban Florida in a very small conservative church believing all my friends at school were going to hell (and bent on taking me with them). I learned early how to embrace being different.
Perhaps because I feel so comfortable as a stranger, I struggle to belong. More precisely, I struggle to accept belonging.
I said to a group of friends once, “I never feel wanted. I always assume people would rather I weren’t at the table.” At the time I hesitated to call those women friends. Even that day, their response to my words made me feel removed, farther away from the center than I had even moments before. But today I know better. I belonged with those women even when I didn’t feel like it (those women who truly loved me despite my reluctance to accept their love). I belonged at their table—not because we shopped together on the weekend. Not because we read the same kinds of books or liked the same movies. We belonged to one another in Christ. We prayed together. We served together. We worshiped and laughed and dreamed together. We learned how to love our neighbors together. We taught children together and led camps together and in all that together we found ourselves transformed from single stalks of wheat into one loaf of bread.
These days, no matter where I go—South Africa, Ireland, Croatia—I’m finding Christ in the kitchen, flour on His hands, the smell of yeast in the air, belonging rising from the oven.
-JL
Some things…
Have you kept up with Look to Love, the podcast? We’ve made it all the way to Job! Job, by the way, is one of my favorite books (and one of the first books my daughter Eve latched onto—weirdly). Who is God in Job? When you’re done looking you might say what Job did in the last chapter: “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” It’s a feel good episode.
Summer is closer than you think! And this summer I’ll be in the states with my husband (Justin Gerhardt, creator of the podcast Holy Ghost Stories) to present a couple Storied Family workshops—one in Nebraska and one in St. Petersburg, FL. Click through for more info! By the way, we might have room for one more location. If your church is interested and you have a free weeknight in June (6-9pm), let me know. Maybe we can work something out.
I have now officially been on a safari. I would happily take a game drive every morning for the rest of my life. God’s animals are perfect.
Relate with this on so many levels. this is beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
Yes, strangers and siblings! Both at the same time. Never boring for sure💫