My church is going to celebrate our 25th anniversary this week.  As you can imagine, we’ve gone through a lot in that time.  We’ve had our celebrations, births, weddings, funerals, baptisms, Christmases and Easters, retreats and advances.  We've met at a storefront, a high school, afternoons at another church, portable buildings, and finally our own performing arts facility built largely with volunteer staff.  There are hundreds of people to whom I have given my heart—in ministry and in life—for a season and for eternity. 

There are decades of memories wrapped up in this celebration, from special private moments with one or two people to countless moments in public congregational intimacy through worship and other artistic expressions.  There have been large numbers of people (numbers known only to God) who have committed their lives to Christ.  I’ve had the privilege of being able to share the creative process with hundreds—maybe thousands—of actors, dancers, musicians, producers, technical artists, poets, painters, graphic artists, recording engineers, writers, photographers, vocalists, artisans, visionaries.  And I have laughed so hard and so long, that I’ve gone to bed with a sore belly.

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I call my mom tonight, both to say hello, and to talk to her about her upcoming party in September. You see, she's turning 90, which means that she grew up in the great depression, married in the midst of the war, and raised my sister and I in the midst of Kennedy's assassination, Vietnam, and Watergate. She lost her first child at birth, and in the process nearly lost her life, leaving her without the capacity to bear children. It was because of this that my sister and I were adopted into the Dahlstrom family and heritage. Her husband's multiple childhood bouts with pneumonia would lead him to an early death, and my adopted sister would die at the age of 43, leaving only my mom and I for the past 14 years.

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woe to those who justify unfaithfulness to the Church: will we be committed to the gathered people of God?

This is not about taking time to find a spiritual home in a new city or a new season.

Nor is this about house churches or centralization or institutions or organized religion or appreciating the diversity of the Body of Christ...

This is about cultivating a lifestyle of being spiritually transient.

This is about going from dessert to dessert, rarely sticking around for the main meal let alone the clean-up. This is about traveling from this worship experience to that creative teaching to this fresh community and that vulnerable small group...always grazing, never planting. 

Why? Reasons abound. The church is sickly here, ingrown there, out of touch, filled with hypocrites...We can appreciate God anywhere...We don't need to belong to a church to worship God...

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