the pastor’s wife, part two.

In part one of this post, I shared the story of my journey to becoming a pastor’s wife.

So God is giving me more and more of this freedom, this peace with the person He made me to be, this desire to be used by Him.

What does that look like in our church plant?

Who am I going to be and what am I going to do now that I’m a pastor’s wife?

I’d say that my biggest passion for the church is relationships and community.

To me, this is at the core of who the Church, who the Bride of Christ is.  This is why we’re called the “Body.”  I’d even go so far as to say that where you don’t have community you don’t have church.  Why else would Jesus say, right before He died, that the world will know we love God by our love for each other?

Such a strange thing to say.  Not: the world will know we love God by our awesome VBS or our drum-tight theology or conservative politics.  No.  God’s mystery is that people will know we belong to Him by the way we radically, sacrificially love each other.

It’s hard to love each other.  We are selfish.  We are self-righteous.  We disagree about all sorts of things.  We are consumed with our jobs and our own family’s needs.  We get hurt feelings.  We gossip.  We are insecure.  We withdraw for a break from all this hard work and heartache of relationships.  Sometimes we leave Church altogether—either physically leave, or sit in the pew and listen to the sermon and emotionally check out from community.

I am guilty of every single one of these things.

So often as Christians we think spiritual battle comes from outside of us, from the culture and from non-Christians.  But I don’t think that’s true.  I think way more often the battle comes from within us.  It comes from within me.  It comes when my sin and self-righteous pride tear me from my brothers and sisters, cause me to think they’re the problem, cause to roll my eyes and disengage and look elsewhere for emotional support.

But here’s the thing.  I don’t have the option of taking a break or checking out.  You don’t have the option.  Jesus said, “They will know you love Me if you love each other.”

The Church, this broken, sinful, exasperating community, is the one way to tell the world about Jesus.

And so God’s been building up in my heart this steely resolve to stay.  To engage.  To fight for His Bride and to fight for community.  To invite others into community.  And then to rest.  To say, “If there’s love in the Church it’s not because of our organized small groups or ministry strategies.  It’s because of the Holy Spirit.”

Authentic, sacrificial, unified, joyful community is so very counter-cultural and so very hard to find that it makes my heart sing when I see it because it means God is changing lives.  It means He’s loving us in the midst of our junk and our selfishness, and He’s using the people around us to refine us to grow us, to make us look outside ourselves at what He’s doing in the world.

And I, the pastor’s wife, need this community as much as anyone else in our church plant.

My passion is to encourage and build and learn from our community and to invite others to join us.

This is my calling.

Here are a few thoughts about what I want this calling to include.  I’d love to help foster and extend community by:

1. Opening my home.

I believe hospitality is one of the most powerful gifts any church can have and it’s one of the best ways to encourage community.  It doesn’t just take the pastor’s wife—it takes lots of different people willing to have a cook-out or invite someone over for coffee or invest in one of those big wooden play-sets and be the yard where the neighbor kids love to congregate.

I think hospitality and evangelism go hand-in-hand.  It’s way less intimidating to simply invite someone into your home to hang out than to try to share the gospel with them door-to-door.  I want to share Jesus by bringing people into our life and introducing them to our friends, by growing friendships over hobbies, by rejoicing with them when they’re happy and by praying with them when they’re struggling.

There are several people in our church plant who are far more gifted in hospitality than I, and at one time, that would’ve made me feel insecure.  But now it just makes me feel liberated: I’m not doing this alone!  We’re all in it together! I love learning from them.

2. Befriending people who are different from me

I don’t want to just get to know young moms or married couples or thirty-somethings or people of my race or my religion or political beliefs.  For the last few years, I’ve tried to purposefully pray for and pursue friends who are different from me.  Not just so I can “get them into our church” (although I’d love for them to be drawn into the family of God).  No, because it’s good for me.

I look at the life of Jesus and looked at how much of His ministry involved noticing, speaking with, healing, and loving people very different from Him, even when it hurt His reputation.

I don’t want to “minister to the poor.”  I want to befriend a poor person.  Not because she needs me.  Because I need her.  I need her to open my eyes to a way of life so different from mine, to expose the ugliness of my prejudice, to show me the needs of a whole different demographic–and also the strengths of a whole different demographic.

There is always something to learn from people who are different.  We don’t need to make them like us.  We don’t need to be threatened by them.  We need to listen and to love.  And the listening and the loving will change us.

I want our church to be filled with many kinds of people, and in order for that to happen, I need to be willing to meet and befriend many kinds of people.  Can you imagine the power here, in the southern United States, of a church filled with people of different races, different economic groups, different interests, different political groups?

That feels impossible and it is my dream.

3. Being transparent and allowing myself to be known by my church

There’s no hierarchy in God’s family.  Pastors and pastor’s wives are just as sinful and in need of grace and have just as much to learn as the others in their church body.  I want my church friends to know my weaknesses, to know the specific idols I battle on a daily basis.  I don’t want my confessions to be general as they so often are: “I struggle with my prayer life”, “I struggle with pride.”

It’s only as God gives me freedom to confess real sin and show our church my real limitations that anyone can see His power at work in my life.  It’s only as I’m needy and ask for help that others are empowered and used by Him and that I am humbled.

I’ve shared before that I’m not by nature a transparent person.  It’s a learned habit.  I’ve mostly learned from watching men and women I look up to so very much be transparent and repentant.  I’ve seen the beauty in it, felt the power it floods into my own heart: Oh, he’s a sinner just like me. If God’s freeing him, maybe He can free me.

I want to live that way for the people in my life.  I want to become smaller and let God become bigger in their eyes.  I want them to look at me, look at the beauty God’s making of hot-mess-Julie, and I want them to be filled with hope.

4. Taking care of myself and learning to say “no”

I can’t do it all.  I just can’t.  And inasmuch as I try to, I’m relying on my own strength and my performance to gain approval from God and people.

This church plant isn’t a sprint.  It’s a marathon.  I think our culture, and maybe particularly our church culture, glorifies burn-out.  If you burn out, you must be truly, passionately sold out for Jesus.  If you’re super busy, then you must be really important in the kingdom of God.

But I want to be right here, quietly and faithfully loving my family and my church and my city in ten years.

To be able to do that I need to take care of myself, to guard my family, and to be free to say “no” to some things — some good things, even.  I need to not burn out.  I remember our friend Richey saying once that it’s an act faith to sleep eight hours a night.  It’s faith that says, “God created my body with limitations for a reason.  I will submit to His creation.  I am not indispensable to His work.”  What a freeing thing.

In this very busy season of life, David and I are practicing the habits of rest and sleep and exercise and fun.  We’re reading books about things completely unrelated to church work and we’re finding new ways to enjoy our city and to be lifelong learners.

This isn’t a black-and-white area.  Some weeks or whole months will be have to be very intense, while others can be more restful.  It requires continual openness to listen to one another and others around us and most of all the Holy Spirit.

5. Cultivating a community of safety and depth.

I want to serve our city.  I want to have a meaningful children’s ministry.  I want camping trips and pot-lucks and joyful Sunday morning worship.  But none of that matters if our church community isn’t a safe, authentic place.

This is something that already amazes and humbles me about our little group.  The Holy Spirit is creating a safe place among us.  In such a few short months, I look up to these friends and I trust them.

I want to be intentional to go deep with one another, to be able to share the really hard things, and I want us to invite others in.  This is hard.  It takes time and a lot of patience.  It takes being vulnerable and risking hurt.

I long to be a church of women who may not necessarily agree on a whole lot of the surface issues of life, but who can say about one another, “She’s got my back.” Who know that there’s no competition here, but that instead we actually celebrate diversity and all kinds of opinions.  Who can trust the others not to gossip.  Who can rest in the knowledge that we’ll stay together and work it out, whatever it is, that nothing’s going to come between us.

We are broken people.  I am broken and sinful and it grieves my heart to know I will sin against and hurt the people in our church.  But I’m trusting God to show me my sin, to bring repentance, to heal wounds that I cause my family and others.

And when you think about it, it’s strange how often He uses moments of brokenness and restoration to forge friendships even deeper and build a community of true, authentic safety.

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So.  You may read this list and be thinking, “Wow, sounds amazing.  Sounds too good to be true actually.”

That’s my temptation too.  But lately I’m convicted that I expect way too little from God. I don’t want to do that.  I want to “live out of abundance rather than out of lack,” as one author says.

I want to pray and live and love in abundance.  I want to believe that God will use our church to bring people to Jesus.   I want to believe He’ll change lives.  I want to believe He’ll change my life.

I know it will be messy.  I know I’ll fail and drift from these values and have to be steered back.  I know I need people around me to pray and correct and love and teach me.  I’m ready for the adventure.