sunday

what do i miss?

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Sunday rolls around again every week.

After a year without a church to attend on Sunday mornings, two years of sporadic pandemic meeting before that, you’d think I’d be used to it.

You’d think it wouldn’t be one of my first thoughts anymore, but it still is, week after week.

I open my eyes in the bed, and my whole being feels the fact that it’s Sunday, and I won’t be going to church.

What do I miss?

Not God.

Forgive how icky and fake this sounds, but it’s not God I miss on these Sunday mornings. He’s as near as ever.

I’ve come to be convinced¹ that no matter how I might feel in any given moment, the Lord’s distance from me never changes. I’m in a constant orbit both around Him and within Him. I’m held in Him, and He’s as near and as involuntary and as essential as my every breath.²

Do I miss community?

Not really. Sunday was never really where I found that. Sunday was a chance to see the faces, for a few moments at a time, of people who were part of my actual community. But Sunday wasn’t where that community was built or most fully expressed. That happened in Bible study groups, over coffee, in paragraph-long text messages. And that community remains. Several such communities remain because God has always given me the best of friends in abundance.

Do I miss the activity itself, the gathering?

Some of it, though so much of it feels unnecessary to gather for these days. Most Sunday mornings are focused on a sermon and worship songs. Everyone says it’s about more than that, but I fail to see how when so much of a church’s identity is built around sermons and songs. And when that’s where a church focuses most of its resources.

And here’s the thing, if Sunday gatherings are mostly for sermons and songs, it’s hard for me to motivate myself to go. I can find better sermons online and in podcasts. And I am my own favorite DJ, constantly playing my curated collection of meditative and reflective and worshipful music.

Don’t get me wrong. I think we’re intended to gather. And the gathering can be great. I’ve definitely loved it over the years… but honestly, I’m tired of how much Sunday morning has become a consumer product, and I’m sick of consuming it, sicker still of being a part of trying to produce it, over a year removed from participating in church leadership.

I do miss the wooden pews of my childhood. My heart actually physically aches as I type that out. I miss liturgy and struggling to sing hard songs from the hymnal. I hardly ever feel as at home as I do in my small, hometown Lutheran church. And I miss that. The simplicity of it. The unaffected earnestness of it. I thank the Lord for planting me in that soil. Nothing could have nourished me quite like it did, and I miss every old thing about it, from the candles and the stained glass to the Kyrie³ and the unresolved chords.

Is that missing church? Or just longing for tradition, missing childhood and home? Again, my heart has that tender ache, a child homesick at sleep away camp.

What do I miss? Am I missing anything at all? Or has my life in the evangelical Bible Belt solidified that weekly attendance checklist beyond what I can undo?

The word that keeps coming to my mind is “rootedness.” I miss the rootedness of church.

How’s that for a clunky phrase? But that’s what I miss. The rootedness.

Not the belonging. I have that in family and friends. I belong.

Not the belovedness. I am Christ’s beloved and He is mine, apart from any other person or place.

Not even the body, for I am part of the body of believers in many ways, an active participant in friendship and service in ways unfacilitated by an institution but church just the same.

What I miss is the rootedness. The place to call home, the specific gathering of saints to be devoted to and with, week after week. The connection to the historic church, the connection to a specific congregation.

Paul writes to the church of God in fill-in-the-blank city, to the saints of certain towns, to the brethren who gather in a certain home.

There is a place to connect the people.

And that is what I am missing.

Roots for myself, for my family, for my son.

That’s what I’m missing, what I feel called to find.

Lord, You planted and raised me in fertile soil. I’ve been transplanted many times, and You are always faithful. Take these wild roots—dangling loose yet firmly planted in You—and settle them in the earthly soil where You would. Amen.

1. as convinced as I ever am about anything, that is (absolute language seems always to require a caveat for me)

2. Colossians 1:17, Acts 17:27-28

3. For those not raised in this type of tradition, here’s an example of a Kyrie eleison (“Lord, have mercy”) liturgy, followed by one of my all-time favorite songs from the Lutheran liturgy. How many hundreds of times have I sung this? The lyrics are based on passages from Revelation (something I didn’t discover until adulthood), and I like to imagine that we’ll all sing it together one day.