Questions to consider this week: How were you being a good neighbor to those in your Arborlawn community pre-COVID? How can you be a good neighbor to your Arborlawn community now?
As you are now looking out into your physical neighborhood to find others in the vicinity who are also Arborlawn worshipers, you know that at a base level you have the physical church building as common ground between you. But you also know that the ekklesia, the Greek word we translate as ‘church’, has never actually been about the building. YOU, the people, are the church!
“As God’s household, you are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. The whole building is joined together in him, and it grows up into a temple that is dedicated to the Lord. Christ is building you into a place where God lives through the Spirit.”
(Ephesians 2:20-22, CEB)
The physical building of AUMC has been where many of you have been the church, but COVID has forced us into a reality that we already knew - the church, as a body of believers, must exist outside the walls of any building in order for it to grow and thrive.
In asking you to spend a little time with Arborlawn folks who live in your neighborhood, we’re not really asking anything different from you than when we were asking you to come through the AUMC doors on Sunday morning. It may look a little different, but we are still asking you to love each other well as a community and to continue to nurture those relationships in faith.
At some point in the future, we will all be able to gather together in person in our beloved building, but until then, we must stay vigilant in our work of building community outside the walls of AUMC. Imagine a future where we come back from COVID even stronger than we were before COVID. Just because we’re not able to invite people into our space right now does not mean we can’t invite people into relationship with the one who transformed our hearts in that sacred space.
God cannot be contained by any building, and neither can God’s church. Are you, Arborlawn church, ready to meet God in your neighborhood?
Prayer:
Good and loving God, how easy it is for us to underestimate just how big you are. Let your presence and peace rest on us today so that we can be brave enough to do the work you’ve always called us to do; work which requires us to go ‘out’ to be your people in the world. May we, the Arborlawn community, grow closer together in this unique time of ‘church.’ Amen.
Written By: Jenny Spidell