People are leaving us.
That might seem like an odd way to start an Easter reflection but stick with me.
It’s true, people are leaving us, but this is how things tend to go at Ponce Pres. We are a metro church in every sense. We have members who live as far out as Dallas, GA and members who live right around the corner. I myself pass a number of churches on my way to Ponce every Sunday. Still, my wife and I have felt called to Ponce basically since we arrived in Atlanta, about seven years ago. I know many others who feel the same—they sense their calling to Ponce despite living in Norcross, College Park, Marietta, or Decatur.
Callings do change though.
Being a metro church has its challenges. Apart from the church plant budding from Ponce’s roots, which has drawn away some established members (God be praised!), Ponce has had the privilege of seeing people marry and have children in our church. Sometimes, for affordability reasons and needing space to breath, they head out to the suburbs. They may or may not remain members at Ponce. Some feel the natural pull of a stronger gravity the farther their orbit extends—that of their new neighborhood. This is a beautiful thing! Ponce has also had the privilege of seeing people arrive in Atlanta for their studies. Whether at GT, Emory, GSU, or elsewhere, they don’t always hang around. There’s nothing wrong with that either! It’s the same with some professionals who arrive only to leave after a couple years or relocate for other career opportunities. There’s nothing wrong with that either! God calls us to excel at our vocations.
I would be remiss not to mention that some of our members have simply died. I think of Brent or Sharon, for instance. It’s hard, harder even than losing those who move, but we can hopefully find some comfort in knowing they’re now in Jesus’s presence.
Similarly, it always seems that Ponce gets refilled in waves—by babies or by relocations. My wife and I were part of one such wave. We arrived right when several other couples and singles arrived. We bonded with some of them. One couple in particular eventually moved to EAV, where they felt called to attend a church in their immediate neighborhood. Last month I had a chance to stop in at their home. It had probably been about a year and a half since I had seen them. It felt like a beautiful reunion. I imagine I will continue to see them around town or we’ll get together here and there. Still, if I’m honest, my heart grieves the loss of their daily presence. But, this is the way we all live these days and there is nothing necessarily wrong with our movement and changing church homes. In fact, as I sense we gear up for a season of transition, I must admit that I actually encouraged a family moving out to the suburbs that they kick the tires of some churches in their new neighborhood.
I want to talk about something—grieving and celebrating those who leave Ponce.
As a church, we should be drawing closer together. It may not always be perfect. It may be entirely absent from time to time. Whether that’s on us or on others in our lives, I leave that to the individual heart to determine. We should grieve departure though. We should mourn losing the daily presence of our brothers and sisters in Christ. On the other hand, we should celebrate it too! We get to see those with whom we have shared our lives go onward into the world to serve and worship Jesus with other believers in new places, whether right around the corner or across the globe.
I was recently reading a novel about two pastors and their wives called The Dearly Beloved. One pastor is a skeptic married to an ardent believer. One pastor is a firm believer married to an atheist. The two pastors end up sharing a pulpit at a NYC church during the tumultuous 1960s. Both men and their wives make their congregants quite uncomfortable with their positions on social issues and openness to the turbulent times.
Over the course of the novel, one of the pastors and his wife have twins, one of whom is autistic. In these early days of autism research (the 1960s), parents often didn’t know how to love or live with their autistic children, and the children would end up in group homes where a lack of staff and social support meant the children simply could get the love and attention they needed. The pastor and his wife are determined to keep their son in their own home, but they are also fearful of the reactions of those around them. They begin to retreat into their family unit. The other pastor and the rest of the church notice their attempted retreat and draw closer to them, sometimes being pushed away and sometimes making missteps in trying to be helpful. Regardless of their failures at engaging, the other pastor and the congregants earnestly seek the family out. It comes to the point that the other pastor and the congregants create a school for autistic children, staffed by medical professionals and well-trained special ed teachers.
Sometime later, the pastor whose child is autistic must baptize the newborn child of his fellow co-pastor. He looks out at the congregations and begins with “Dearly beloved.” I will let the author, Cara Wall, narrate it:
“Dearly beloved,” he began. They were the words that started weddings, not baptisms, but the people in the church were his beloved, so dear that as he spoke his heart and throat grew tight. He loved every person in this church more than he would have ever thought possible, loved them not with the automatic love of childhood or the easy love of coincidence, but with the tautly stitched love of people who have faced uncertainty together, who have stuck it out, the strong love of people who looked to their side while suffering and saw the other there.
Now, remember that this is a baptism scene. It is about young people. It is about confirming the faith of the families of those young people. It is about how they plan to raise children in the admonition of the Lord. Cara Wall continues,
Together, they [the parents] would send all of these young people out into a world they knew was full of injury and hard to bear. Somehow, they would wave and wish them well and have faith that they would avoid the worst of the darkness, live mostly in the light.
I find these words so moving. The church members, he comes to find, amidst the personal hardships of life and the ruptures in their society, have become his beloved; they are “tautly stitched” together. How beautiful an image. Still, here at a baptism, he’s compelled to reflect on the fact that they will have to send their children out into a scary world. This world contains the very brokenness he’s had to face. I love the line, “they would wave and wish them well and have faith that they would avoid the worst of the darkness, live mostly in the light.”
The first time I read these words I was moved to reflect on Ponce, but not in terms of baptisms and young people leaving home, but in terms of our departures. We have seen and will see our fair share of departures. We’ll have to wave and wish them well and have faith that they would avoid the worst of the darkness and live mostly in the light. There’s both pain and hope in this. Hopefully, we can be stitching ourselves together to this degree, that we would call each other beloved and grieve our departures. For now, I leave it to you to wonder how you do this.
What I actually want to do, however, is encourage you, not chastise you. I submit we can do better even than Wall suggests. We can grieve the losses, we can wave goodbye, and we can have faith (and pray) for their futures apart from us. These are no doubt a must. But, we can also do more—we can celebrate eternal reunion. We believe there’s a future beyond this life if we are in Christ. It involves a table where we will sit with our fellow saints and our Lord and enjoy the bountiful harvest of a world restored to glory. Regardless of whether or not I see you around town, we believe we’ll see each other again in another life. We can embrace each other now and release our grip when the Lord says it’s time to let go. After all, we will embrace each other again. Even when we fail to embrace each other well on this earth (I know many of us feel this way), we won’t fail in the life to come.
There are many reasons why people leave our church. Some with joy and celebration, some in a more disgruntled manner (for good reason or not), some because we just cannot serve them for a season or two. My hope is that regardless of how they leave, we all recognize how we will be together again someday, our joys completed, our disagreements done.
Enter Easter.
Easter is somewhat weird for us as Christians, as is Good Friday for that matter. Good Friday is, well, “good.” What Jesus did in suffering and dying for us was certainly “good,” yet we dress in black and treat it like a funeral. It isn’t totally dark though because what actually makes it good is what happens next: Easter. Easter feels like a day of new life and celebration, a breath of fresh air… Yet, it’s also kind of not when you stop and think about it. As Christians we rightly believe that Jesus’s resurrection remains the pinnacle event in human history, but still, it didn’t set the world right right now. In fact, Jesus left us.
Okay, okay. He left us with the Holy Spirit and went to prepare a place for us (in no way am I minimizing that), but we--the church--are still awaiting the full return of our bridegroom. We--arm in arm, you and I--will be together in eternity.
A future, eternal togetherness is a beautiful hope we can lean on as Christians, especially as we reflect on our struggle to maintain connections during pandemic living, as we witness members moving on, and as we turn our attention to the not-entirely-completed joys of Easter. Hopefully, we won’t abuse our future, eternal togetherness by resting on our heels in the here and now. Instead, I pray that our future, eternal togetherness may push us forward in love to such a degree that we can both grieve our departures and embrace them. Right now, let’s rest in the joy Easter brings, while realizing we’ll eventually bask side-by-side in an even more complete joy.