Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Her eyes rimmed with tears, red from a night of mourning.

“I had to come, to take my communion,” she told the priest. Her husband died mere hours earlier. She had a lot of places she could be: in bed, on the couch, numb and unseeing, drowning in grief. But she came to church. Because as her beloved husband crossed from this life to the next, she needed to partake in the presence of the body of Christ. 

On the same Sunday at a congregation three miles away, picketers greeted worshipers. They were not gentle picketers who merely wanted to be seen but hecklers and taunters. A coworker who attends the congregation said her Sunday School kids were rattled: “They said my mom was a terrible person.” Ultimately members of the congregation formed a human tunnel, a safe space for congregants to walk into the church. 

The protesters were itching for engagement. And the parishioners obliged. But not in the expected way. Instead, said my coworker, “We invited them in. We invited them to come to church.” 

I’m sure similar stories played out across the country as the Church and its people lived the witness of Christ. We get wrapped up in budget meetings and vestry decisions, in debates over polity and piety, but the church is best when it’s being church. When its doors are open to embrace the grieving and the aggrieved. When the first place a new, raw widow wants to go, needs to go, is the altar. When a people can rise above the indignant lump in their hearts and invite in the angry or disenfranchised. 

How can you be the church today? At work? In stores? In your homes and in your hearts?