practice service.

We hesitated to call this Sunday’s worship service with our core group a “practice service” because of course such a thing doesn’t exist.  There’s no “practice” in the family of God because the Holy Spirit is always with us and everything we do, whether it’s building sound panels or buying office furniture or tuning a guitar or texting a new friend, is real worship.

But having said all of that, with the full knowledge that we are a garden and not a corporation, it still takes an enormous amount of work to gather for worship as a group.  It takes knowing where the bathrooms are and whether the children’s space is properly sanitized and how the offertory transitions into the sermon.

And so this Sunday, August 18, was our real practice service.

It’s been a long, hard summer friends.  Many weeks I’ve scarcely seen my husband.  And other women in our church plant have scarcely seen their husbands.  There’ve been a thousand details, a thousand (or several thousand?) texts exchanged, meetings, phone calls, orders, last-minute problems to be solved.

And it’s been a long year for our family of not having a church home.  Ever since we moved back from South Asia we’ve worshipped in a different church nearly every.single.week.  Because first we were connecting with supporting churches.  And then came the missions conferences.  And after that, after we got the green light from our denomination and David was an official church planter, the support-raising started all over again.  David has spoken at different churches most Sundays this summer.  It’s been wonderful and it’s also been difficult.

I tell you all of this because I want to better explain the surge of joy that grew in my heart all of last week.  When things were hard, when I felt so exhausted, I could see the light of this Sunday’s worship service, and my friends, I was so very happy.

And when the kids and I walked in the Blanding Street entrance of Tapps on Sunday morning I could’ve cried I was so relieved.  It felt like coming home.

The whole morning felt like that.  Several things were already going wrong by the time I got there.  The bulletins weren’t printed.  The power point wasn’t working.  But nothing could dampen the gladness in the air around us.  There was coffee brewing, there were smiling faces, and people filed in the doors.  I saw familiar faces and I saw new faces and I wanted to talk to all of them at once.

Judah and Amie and I ventured down the winding stairs to the basement where the kids gather.  My parents are in charge of the children’s’ ministry at Columbia Pres this year (did I tell you that?), and the room we walked into was magical.  They thought of everything.  Bright-striped rugs on the floors and a changing table for the babies and toys and books and little wooden tables for the fours-and-fives class.  Shari was sitting there, checking in the kids, gathering information.

And so I dropped my kids off and went back upstairs to my spot as a greeter and spent the moments before the service started meeting new friends and showing folks to the nursery and giving lots and lots of hugs.  I loved glancing around the room and seeing others do the exact same thing.

The worship service was so very sweet.  Leading up to yesterday I would pop over to Tapps and just stand and look hard around the Skyline room and for the life of me fail to imagine a church worshipping in that space.  But it was perfect.  It really was.  That’s not to say everything went off without a hitch of course (the power point never did get to working).  But it’s to say, it was just right.  God was present in our midst.  Kenny and our friend Leslie led us in worship and as we all sang the familiar hymns soaked into my heart. We moved through the rhythms of the liturgy and I bowed in prayer and listened to my husband preach from I Corinthians and I felt deeply grateful.

God is faithful when He calls.  It’s not always easy.  But I can tell you that the joy of watching Him answer prayer is better than easy.  When we gather together we know — because we’ve been through it — that this is all happening because of Him.

After the service, after more conversations and packing up chairs and sound equipment, a group of us went out to Five Guys for lunch.  It was chaotic and loud and happy.

Then later on that afternoon as soon as naps were over I loved that the four of us piled in the car and drove over to Kenny and Shari’s, because we all just had so much to talk about.  The kids played and the grown ups ate chips and homemade guacamole as we debriefed.  I feel very humbled to have a family who loves talking about church planting as much as David and I do, who cares about the little details few would think of.

I told David that the best part of Sunday was that it all just felt so natural — natural to be gathering with these people, worshiping God with these people, dreaming and planning ahead for the future with these people.

Now we have a couple weeks’ hiatus since our official launch is after Labor Day.  And that’s great because there are some kinks to iron out, changes to be made so that everything will run more smoothly.  And all of that is just as much worship as gathering on Sunday morning.

As David announced at the close of the service, “We will begin services September 8th and worship together until the Lord returns.”  I can’t wait.