A Gathered People

If you come to worship at Oak Grove UMC in Charlotte, you may notice the way each act of worship is named in the Sunday bulletin. The first item is one of the most important: “GATHERING.” You might wonder why GATHERING is worth listing at all – it does not seem as “sacred” as singing hymns or reading scripture or reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Yet GATHERING really is a holy activity, especially considering the God we worship.

One sure thing the Bible reveals is that God has an interest in communities of people. God is not only interested in saving individual persons but also tries to get people to live with one another, cooperatively, together. Jesus redeems both human relationships with Godself and human relationships with one another. God is not content just that we might love him more properly – God also wants us to love one another. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13.34).

It is practically a definition of being Christian: if you love Jesus, you must be part of his Church, where we learn to love and be reconciled to one another and to spread that love and reconciliation out into the world. Thus, the act of GATHERING is sacred, a sign of our commitment to live in community, to be reconciled with one another, to love as Jesus calls us.

One of the first things we can do to increase worship attendance in our churches is to gather in those members of our church who have stopped being active participants. After all, they promised to be here when they joined the church, to participate in its ministries with their presence. But also remember, we promised to care about them, to help them abide in our reconciling community, to reach out to them when they are absent, to make sure we ask how they are and offer our help if it is needed. It is in this way that we work to reconcile whatever differences or discomforts or exclusions or life changes that have caused our GATHERING at church to be less than whole. It is in this way that we learn what it looks like to be reconciling in all our dealings with others locally and globally.

If you are an active member of a church, anywhere, please open your church directory, find the page where your own name appears, and call someone on that page you haven’t seen in a while. Let them know they are loved by their church community and that you miss GATHERING with them.