I'm tired of going to church!

Yeah, that's right. That's not a typo. I'm tired of going to church.

Now you know there has to be a catch. After all, I'm a pastor! Time for a career change if I hate the church. Ah, well there is the conundrum. I don't hate the Church. I love the Church. Always have. Even in those times when, well, the church has been less than loveable. I can never imagine that changing. It's the call that God has given me.

However, I am tired of going to church. Why? The whole notion of Church being something I can go to and leave is a complete misunderstanding of the Church that God established and that we read about in the Bible. The Church IS the called and gathered people of God. It is our identity. You can no more go to Church than you can go to Smith or Schaeffer or [insert your last name here]. My name is part of my identity. It marks me as belonging to a family. The family can, for sure, gather, but I don't cease being a part of that family when we are not together. I am a Schaeffer. Similarly, the idea of going to Church is nonsensical. I am, we are, the Church.

That is an important mental shift to make. To think of Church as a place you can go to is to fail to see it as identity. You can go to Boy Scouts. You can go to the country club. You can go to the "Y". We hold membership in these things. We may feel a kindred relationship with others who are members. We may even feel that they are a part of our identity, but they do not define us. They are not the whole of who we are. To be Church is to know that this identity cannot be compartmentalized into some tidy corner of our lives. To be Church is to live knowing that one's relationship with God invades every area of our lives. I am, we are, the Church. Apart from this, I cannot be known.

Yet, so many of us, myself included more often than I care to admit, slip Church into that neat and safe category of something we are members of. We compartmentalize it. We come and go from the Church as we please. If we're really religious, that means once a week. I cannot help but believe that Jesus himself weeps over a Church that has become so institutionalized.

So, I am tired of going to church. I am grief-stricken at the notion of the Church seeing itself as going to church. I want to be the Church. I want the Church to be the Church. I want to see the transformation that would take place within the Church and the power for good, for love, for hope that would cascade out into the world like a spiritual tsunami if the Church embraced its identity. I am, we are, the Church.