Society shapes us, discipleship to Christ reshapes us. Belonging to a local church is a key aspect of our discipleship to Christ, and is therefore, key to our re-formation as people. Whilst our first family (the one we’re born into) has the primary influence on us, the second family of the church ought to have the lasting influence over us - meaning, it deposits things in us that last for eternity.
It follows from this that what occurs during gatherings of the church are key aspects of our discipleship since they’re meant to form us into the image of Christ some more.
Jesus said: “Go and make disciples… teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…” that was the MO given to us by our CEO, the agenda that’s meant to help inform everything we do.
I’ve thought about the mechanics of our Sunday gatherings a fair amount, and as a pastor I’ve experimented with a lot of different things over the years. Having been on church staff for twenty years now I’ve been in and created worship services with a range of different things. At various times we’ve used dance, moving lights, haze, videos, spoken words and drama. I’ve sat through sermons (and preached a few myself) that were close to an hour in length but I’ve also delivered ten minute exhortations. I’ve done the leg repetitions of an Anglican (up, down, up down) but I’ve also sung for a full ninety minutes. I’ve seen the full range of the charismatic gifts in operation too from prophetic actions, to specific prophecies, to healings, to tongues and interpretation. I’ve even been prayed through a few ‘fire tunnels’ in my time.
Almost all of the things I’ve seen, practised and believed-for over the years have had some degree of merit to them, all of them certainly have their place in some gatherings of the church.
Whilst I’ve witnessed a lot of variation ‘from the stage’ or in the kind of meetings we put on, there’s one part of the church’s worship services that I’ve hardly ever seen change. I can think of Sunday gatherings over the years that haven’t had sermons or much singing, but I can’t ever recall coming to church and this not being a part of it. I’m referring of course to the part of the gathering (that most people don’t even consider ‘part of the gathering’ at all), the serving of refreshments. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a guest event, a baptism Sunday or a prayer Sunday. It matters not whether we share communion or recite the creed or share the peace, there will always always be a time for tea and coffee, or chai and juice, oranges and brioche or biscuits and cake.
It seems almost sacrosanct, untouchable even, and yet its precisely because of its familiarity that it’s likely we’ve given it next to no thought or attention. We should.
This part of a Sunday gathering, that usually happens after we’ve ‘dismissed’ the room, is as vital as any other part of our meeting together. In fact I’d suggest that, in a cultural context like ours, its possibly of greater importance than some of the formal bits we do in the meeting proper.
Our Cultural Context
Our social and cultural reality, the background we all bring with us to church, is one of consumerism on the one hand and, what we might call, ‘therapeutic spirituality’ on the other. It’s these realities more than many others, that inform how people relate to Sunday gatherings and it’s the dominance of these realities that make the time for refreshments after church even more vital.
Let’s consider consumerism first. We’re trained in this on a daily basis. Our culture needs us token buying things and keep us feeling as though we need to buy more stuff; it’s how our economy functions. It also feeds into our spiritual formation. Not only does the conditioning of consumerism mean we ‘come to church’ expecting a product or service each Sunday (and expect our priests/pastors/prophets/band to engage, entertain and enrich our lives), it also means that we are much more likely to become spectators rather than shapers in the church’s activities. There’s more going on of course than simply ‘consumerism’ - we arrange our meetings like a concert hall, and the presence of 100+ people necessitates that most people won’t be able to speak from the stage. Nevertheless, these things actually serve to make the refreshments after the service all the more important. The only part of a Sunday gathering in which every single one of the saints can play a vital shaping role is this part. When the meeting host says ‘that’s it, we’re done’ every single person in the room is then invited to befriend, love, listen to, serve and pray with whoever they want. Hereby we become the body of Christ mediating Jesus’ presence to the people around us. Even if there’s a case for saying we’re meant to ‘consume’ the service - we ingest the body of Christ and are nurtured by it after all - following this reception of the gospel, we’re meant to then become Jesus’ ambassadors to others.
What this means is that if a person dashes away as soon as the meeting ends, consumerism is having the lasting influence on their worship practise. We are preventing the gospel from doing its ultimate work of re-forming us and we are allowing the world to shape us in its image. The church isn’t meant to be transactional. We aren’t supposed to pray a pray or light a candle and then leave, like making a deposit at the bank or purchasing a blessing from the religious equivalent to Tesco. That’s how pagan spirituality works, that isn’t how the church is meant to operate. Church is the people of God, his family.
Resist, stay for coffee.
As you do so you’ll build links with others, become enmeshed in social networks and make familial friendships. As you do this, not only are you gaining a more Christian perspective on life you’re also enhancing the health of the whole.
Secondly: therapeutic spirituality. What do I mean by this? Closely linked to consumerism, but distinct from it, is the common idea that spiritual practises are private and personal, and also that they’re mood enhancing. People who prefer the term ‘spiritual’ to ‘religious’ often do so for those reasons. Being spiritual depends on me and my freedom to choose how I practise and what I do. And whilst it’s not necessarily selfish, it is certainly self-oriented and selective. After all people who prefer ‘spirituality’ to ‘religion’ often do so because religion sounds to groupthink-y and smacks of institutionalism. Spirituality has less people around me to mess it up!
There are a couple of problems with this from a Christian perspective. First it devalues the body, and sees spiritual practises purely as things that affect the inner life of my emotions and my mind. The second is that it doesn’t lend itself to the creation of community or family something that’s vital to Christian practise. Therapeutic Spirituality isn’t interested in serving others (unless this can be shown to improve oneself), and doesn’t promote self-denial. It also relegates the necessary aspects of building a relationship with someone, to the bin of ‘small talk’. Instead Therapeutic Spirituality wants to dive instantly into personally gratifying experiences and therefore only concerns itself with ‘deep’ conversations. Concerned about local issues? Boring! Worried about your child getting a place at school? Unspiritual!
Needless to say, the way of Jesus is different to this.
Spirituality isn’t the stuff that concerns our inner life but is rather the stuff that concerns (and comes from) the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is concerned with the glorification of Jesus (not the self) and he strengthens us by causing us to feed on and become like Jesus. Become like Jesus. Jesus was a man who loved others, denied himself, preferred his Father’s will to his own and committed himself to people who were clearly below his intellectual and religious ability. The Spirit shapes us into this kind of a human by distributing gifts between the church. This then requires us to both rely on other people and make a deliberate use of our gifts for the sake of others. This is how the Spirit of Jesus takes on bodily form (think Sauron only his opposite!) and this is how we become like Jesus.
How does the part of the church’s gathering that we call ‘fellowship’ do this?
It starts by pushing us into a different mode of Spirituality than the one we’ve been in during the service. Whilst the worship service is taking place it’s easy to preference some people’s gifts over others. Teachers and tongue talkers, or interpreters, get more air time than helpers and peace makers or wisdom bringers. Once the meeting has finished however we can then make room for all the other gifts. We can greet one another with a sign of peace, we can welcome outsiders and show hospitality to strangers. We can listen to (and thereby bring healing) to our brother’s pain, and we can validate our sister’s suffering. Above all, we can deny our needs to be loved and instead offer love to others. This, whilst it may not feel instantly gratifying, is Christian worship and this is the spirituality of the Spirit.
In Conclusion
I’ll never forget my first few months as a pastor in a church planting context. I worked hard to try and ensure my sermon’s added benefit to people’s lives, I spent hours working with the worship team to discuss song selection, and I sat with the meeting hosts and administrators regularly to discuss body participation and the needs of the children’s workers (always for more help).
Despite all that hard work and diligence however I soon came to see that the reason people ‘came back’ each week had very little to do with those things. They weren’t unimportant of course, but they weren’t the thing that was making our church healthy. What I noticed, as we ate food and drank coffee was that slowly but surely friendships were being formed. People were being cared for and life was beginning to emerge.
It got to the point where I felt pretty confident with our family life and would tell people ‘we struggle to get visitors to come to church, but when they do come I can almost guarantee they’ll want to come back.’ And it wasn’t because of the preaching.
It’s almost like Jesus was right when he said: people will be able to tell you’re my disciples by the way you love one another.
The most vital, but often overlooked, parts of a Sunday gathering is the tea and coffee. Don’t screw it up or overlook its importance.
Christians, drink coffee (or tea if you must).