It was a slow summer Wednesday, and I was in the midst of office hours at the church. I'd worked on the sermon, chatted with some church folks, and done a bunch of prep work for the Adult Ed classes I'll soon be leading in the Fall.
At a certain point, I needed to move around again, so I circulated through the rooms of our nearly 200 year old utility building. The "manse" currently houses my office, the copy-room, a nice little sitting parlor, two functioning bathrooms, and a number of rooms that are perhaps most generously described as "storage and utility." In the summer, it does get a little warm, lacking AC as it does. But the structure--state of the art 1827 construction--rests not on a concrete foundation, but on a bed of huge cedar logs, which just set there on the earth below. That means that in the summer the building "breathes," as the rising hot air draws cool air from below, and I find it...with a ceiling fan...perfectly tolerable well into the upper 90s.
It's a permeable space, sometimes a little more permeable than one might expect.
As I wandered into one room, my eye was caught by a decoration I'd not seen before. Did someone put up an artificial vine, one of those greenery decorations one might find in a restaurant of a certain type?
Nope.
It was wild grape, alive and well and pushing into the room from where it had shoved its way past one of the baseboards. For a moment, I had a flashback to back when I was writing my first novel. There'd be mornings where I'd go down into my basement, fire up my PS3, and listen to the music that Gustavo Santaolalla composed for The Last of Us. The OG 2013 video game is one of the most remarkable and emotionally authentic gaming experiences I'd ever had, and the soundtrack is...well. I'd just leave the opening menu running, and the sorrowful strains of end times music would waft over me as I wrote.
The menu looked like this:
This is what ruin looks like. It's more than a little beautiful, in its own way. But it's cold in the winter, and too hot in the summer, and zombies are everywhere.
My mind being what it is, that got me to thinking about permeability, and what we include and do not include in the life of the church. Yes, we need to be open, and we need to be able to speak the language of our culture. Yes, we need to show grace and hospitality, and to be amenable to the growth of the new. Healthy churches aren't closed off to those things, or to the community around them. They are places of grace and welcome.
But we also need to take care.
Because some things, let in, will tear our common spaces apart, will open holes through which other decay and rending growth will come, and then what had been a place of Christ's sanctuary and shelter will crumble and become consumed by the world.
It's a question of discernment, I suppose.
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