Coming Home

As churches start to re-open, there is a real sense of coming home. Pre-recorded online worship has been the reality where I serve for the last 15 months. While I am grateful for technology enabling this, there has been a real disconnect.

Preaching to a camera in an empty sanctuary with two or three people behind me has been strange. I haven’t known if people were with me, getting my jokes or understanding what I was saying because there was no back and forth communication. Most weeks I receive an e-mail or two of appreciation about something in the service and that lets me know people have taken it in. I can also see how many views a service has had and those numbers have been fairly constant since March 2020.

None of this compares to a gathered community experience of worship where we see each other, where people share how their week has been and how their lives are going, where we sing and pray and pass the peace together and hear the Word read and preached in the same holy space. I know it has meant a lot to our people that we’ve recorded from inside the sanctuary. They’ve been able to imagine they are there with us in their spiritual home.

I preached on the prodigal son story last Sunday and I believe that we all are wanting to come home in some way. Televised, radio or online worship just isn’t the same as our church home, despite being legitimate avenues to offer praise and to encounter God. We miss our family of faith, the people who give us strength and who we serve the community with, the people we feel like we’ve known forever who support and encourage us.

The prodigal son parable raises the question of welcome. Our Covid planning team has had to keep pivoting our re-opening plans dependent on the latest government guidelines. We want everyone to feel welcome and safe as we re-open and we recognize that many people will not be rushing back. While more and more are getting their second vaccination and this will alleviate some worry, it is still a long time since we have gathered. Will all be truly welcome? Things have to be different due to ongoing Covid protocols - will it still feel like church, still feel like home, with roped off pews and masks and sanitizer and no congregational singing?

Some of the people at my church have worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic, keeping all the wheels turning so that ministry could continue. Many have backed off, out of anxiety or fear for safety or being overwhelmed with working and supervising school from home or caring for loved ones. It would be easy for those who have been doing the work to resent those who seemingly haven’t who will slide back into worship this fall. The ‘older brothers’ among us will need a healthy dose of grace.

And the ‘younger brothers’ who find their way back and who may feel as though they have missed much and may not be valued (particularly those without computers) need to be welcomed with open hearts and reminded that they are worthy and an important part of the congregation. It would be so easy to allow technology or mobility to alienate people and divide us. We need to celebrate these people coming back who have missed out on our worship for so long.

The Father watches for the lost and celebrates the return of the prodigals. We too need to welcome those who have experienced other things over the last nearly year and a half and who choose to come back among us, whether that is this September or later as they feel able. We get the privilege of being the ones to say with joy “Welcome Home!”