One of the songs on the New Music list at Kinship Radio is “In the House” by Crowder.
After we all spent a year not going to church because of COVID, the song beautifully reminds us of what church — what a really good church–is like.
In it, Crowder describes a church where anyone is comfortable, where anyone can find grace, where we just can’t help celebrating our salvation, where there is so much love and mercy and evidence of the glorious, indescribable love of God in Christ Jesus, you want to hang a “Home Sweet Home” sign in the narthex.
But when I’ve drawn the attention of some of my pastor friends to that song, they haven’t had much to say. One said he wasn’t convinced that the church he served was very much like the church the song describes.
Well, of course not.
Churches are messy places made up of messy people. Church board meetings are filled with more talk of broken furnaces and faded carpet than they are of broken people and threadbare souls. We get caught up in the temporal issues of this world and almost forget about the mission we have to draw people to eternal glory.
Almost.
While no church is perfect, God is worshiped and glorified in those imperfect places. People do encounter His love in the pews and from the pulpit. We do pray and bless and help and truly care about each other. Do we do it imperfectly, poorly, and even forget to love like we should? Yes, but our example is a God who sees all that, knows it better than we know it ourselves, and still, even then, loves us enough to die for us.
So, yes, the song does describe a church that probably doesn’t actually, truly exist outside the idyllic, poetic world of a set of song lyrics.
But what if we used the song as an example, a template, of what we could be? What if just a couple of us tried to be that somebody who loves them and were waiting at the door when they walked in Sunday morning?
You can find an acoustic version of the song and an interview with Crowder and his thoughts on the song here: https://www.youtube.com/