What's Said In Church...
Confined Within Cozy Chapels
My daughters were avid collectors of the Polly Pocket Village. These unique toys, assembled together, make up a miniature town complete with a summer cottage, a pizza parlor, a pet shop, a schoolhouse, a gourmet café, and much much more. If you care to follow a bright pink cobblestone road, around the corner of this village, one will come across a quaint English Tudor chapel. This particular chapel was decked with a lavender brick wall and topped with pink-shingled roof. When you arrive at the entryway you will notice that her doors are swung wide open. Outside the chapel walls, it bustled with activity. There were church members, no taller than a half inch, loitering around the front courtyard. Some of the patrons sat by a lone wooden bench while others stood chatting upon the white washed pebble entrance. As I observed all of this activity confined within the chapel grounds, I asked my daughters, “Where’s the pastor?” The oldest looked up at me and said, “He’s just a sticker Dad.” And the youngest adds, “He’s inside the chapel and stuck to the wall.”
If others outside the church do not see Christ as King and have not experienced his kingdom, it is probably because God’s people, like the pastor, are pasted in the wrong place. The makers of the Polly Pocket Village were definitely on to something. They intended to erase the gray, drab, and uninviting caricature of the traditional church. They spared no expense in sprucing up the entire structure and its surrounding grounds with every color the rainbow had to offer. But in spite of all the attractive fanciful colors displayed on the outside, the mystery of the kingdom of God can only be seen from the inside. According to one theologian, “It is like the colored windows of a church. If you go around the outside of the church, you see nothing but gray monochrome and cannot tell whether they are merely dirty, sooty panes or works of art. In other words, you are seeing them from the wrong perspective. But the moment you enter the nave of the church, the windows begin to shine and the whole story of salvation, captured in color, rises up before you.”[i]
From within the church we joyously make it known, “yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory,” but sadly, what is said in the church stays in the church. These silent walls witness that all our songs, sermons, and prayers are still stuck within this structure. They remain printed in our hymnbooks, hoisted on our bright banners, displayed on our colored windows, and tacked on the Sunday bulletin board. Rather we ought to throw open our church doors and declare to all outside that God’s kingdom is near, that it is here, and that Jesus Christ will come riding on a white horse, with his name emblazoned on his robe and thigh: “King of kings and Lord of lords.”[ii] This realization makes all the difference in the way we live before the outside world in order to draw them to the beautiful mystery of the kingdom within our churches. Get unstuck from within your cozy chapels and church pews. Proclaim it in public and shout it out from the rooftops, “God is King!”
Endnotes
[i] Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father, 152.
[ii] Revelation 19:16.
© 2009, Gicky Soriano. All rights reserved.