March 19thChurch Should…: When Our Expectations Cause Us to Miss the Spirit
- by Eliot Chandler Burns
4 The word of the Lord came to me, saying,
5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew[a] you,
before you were born I set you apart;
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
6 “Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.”
7 But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. 8 Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the Lord.
9 Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “I have put my words in your mouth. 10 See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”
We feel the weight of others’ expectations heavy sometimes. And, we also, like God in this passage, put expectations onto others.
I wonder if Jeremiah found the expectations that God had for him in this passage to be overwhelming. While expectations such as these in Jeremiah 1 can be motivating and inspiring, they can also feel limiting or overwhelming. Jeremiah grew up knowing that God had high expectations. Did he ever feel like he was unable to meet such expectations? Did he ever feel like maybe he wanted to do something else but couldn’t because he needed to do what was expected of him?
We feel the weight of others’ expectations heavy sometimes. And, we also, like God in this passage, put expectations onto others. We make plans for how our children should grow up, we give advice to our friends of what they should do, and we know how our coworkers should do their jobs. Some level of clarity around expectations can be helpful. But sometimes we get so wrapped up in our own ideas of how things “should” be that we miss what could be. We miss other ways of doing things that might shed new light on a problem or open up new possibilities.
We miss the ways our neighbours are doing church differently. We miss the ways the Spirit moves in communities that worship or believe differently than ours.
I think this is perhaps especially true when we think and talk about church. We all have our own ideas of what church should be: how worship should happen, who is “in” and who is “out”, what is appropriate to wear to a Sunday service, what texts should be read on which Sundays, what proper outreach looks like, what programming should be offered, what we should (or should not) talk about in adult ed. Whether the music is hymns or worship music, four part or instrumental. Whether we should donate to soup kitchens or Indigenous organizations, or save for our own capital projects. We sometimes think “church” has to be a Sunday morning worship service, that includes a call to worship, five hymns, congregational story time, scripture reading, a sermon, prayer and a benediction. A sermon always always has to engage with scripture in three points, should include at least one joke, a personal anecdote, and point to Jesus explicitly.
We maybe don’t see potlucks as “Church” or maybe we do, and that might change how seriously we take them. We need to take communion x times a year, meet all the right criteria for baptism, teach the kids exactly these specific things, have regular youth programming, tithe ten percent, and share the good news in the community by inviting people to this specific vision of church. We might think that someone who participates only as a youth sponsor is participating in the community, but not in capital C Church, which happens on Sunday morning. We might think a service at our is the real church and everyone else is not doing it right, or the Catholics actually worship “properly.”
I think it is easy to get wrapped up in these expectations of what church should be. And I think we get so wrapped up in our own specific ideas of what church should be, that we miss out seeing church in new ways. We miss the ways our neighbours are doing church differently. We miss the ways the Spirit moves in communities that worship or believe differently than ours.
I invite you to reflect: what are your strongly-held beliefs about church, worship, or God? Are there ways you are being called to see the Spirit moving in ways you might not expect?
Pray: God, help me to see your Spirit moving in new and creative ways. Amen.
- Eliot Chandler Burns is Executive Director, and a pastor with PiE (Pastors in Exile)