Embracing the unexpected

I had a great evening tonight with a brother in Christ, Kevin Abbott, one of the elders of a network of home fellowships in Fort Wayne with the simple name Neighbors. We spent a couple of hours at the local Starbucks talking and talking. It was very edifying and I am looking forward to getting to know Kevin better and learning from nis experience with a simpler form of the church gathering. During our conversation, something we talked about really struck me.

Being a Christian is inherently full of the unexpected.

When the disciples asked Jesus questions, they almost always got an unexpected answer. When He was confronted with different situations, His response was unpredictable. They certainly weren't expecting to find an empty tomb that glorious morning. The movement of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was certainly not expected. The Bible is full of events that are unexpected, gloriously so.

Here is the problem. We don't like the unexpected, the unpredictable. It makes us nervous and uncomfortable. Nowhere is this more true than in the church. We like our church safe and predictable and certainly don't want anything crazy or unexpected to happen.

I think that is why meeting outside of the comfortable confines of institutional Christianity is so scary for people. It is unexpected. When you "go to church" in a traditional setting, you know what to expect. Go to almost any evangelical church in America this weekend and you can be reasonably confident of what to expect, what will happen and even what time it will occur. Open your home up, without the benefit of the structure that surround a traditional church and who knows what might happen. It can be scary for sure! I think we can do with a little less predictability in the church. Perhaps when we try to control things too much, we limit the ways we can minister to each other. The church should be unpredictable without being chaotic, unexpected without being out of control. Instead of fearing the unexpected, maybe we should embrace it!

I am looking forward to seeing what God is going to do with us in the years to come, even if it is unexpected and often kind of scary.