This Sunday our sanctuary was full and as a pastor looking out on the people, so was my heart.

What really filled me with joy was putting that experience together with a basic theological commitment I can easily forget.

The church is not building it is the people.

Having people of all ages in our building filled me with joy because I saw that Grace Lutheran Church, the people God gathers to hear God’s word, are a people deeply and joyfully connected to other people of all ages that I rarely have the privilege of seeing.

I know we’d love to have the building bursting like that every week; that is our prayer to God.

But don’t let that longing cause you to miss the opportunities you already have to be faithful in the multiple relationships in which you find yourselves.

Grace Church is out and about loving in the world and making a difference not because we have a council-blessed program to get you out there, but because you invest in relationships that matter to you and give you joy, because you invest in relationships that matter to God and their thriving gives God joy.

The resurrected Christ shows up in the community gathered around God’s Word, but he also shows up out in the world at a kitchen table circled with smiling faces, over a phone call or Zoom call checking in on a beloved child, in people going about their work and leisure attentive to the fact that God shows up in these times too.

This Sunday’s worship helped me to see this dispersed work of the Spirit that I often miss. Every Sunday those gathered around the pulpit, font, and table are given an experience meant to see and seed the dispersed work of the Spirit in, with, around, and among us during the rest of the week.

Then full hearts will be our everyday reality and not something saved for a couple of times each year.

About Philip Ruge-Jones

After I served for eighteen years as a professor of theology at Texas Lutheran University, my family decided to return to the Midwest where my wife and I grew up, attended college and seminary. Read more...