Dear saints,

I’ve had the gift and opportunity to spend the past week with clergy from across the United States. It has been fascinating to hear about the relationships they and their church communities have toward their buildings. There is the 300-year-old church that discovered it had 18th century chalices in a safe in the basement. Another parish, following their diocesan split from the Episcopal Church, has spent the past several years worshipping in a local theater, props for the latest show forming the backdrop for altar and song. That particular parish is preparing to move into a former JCPenney turned art gallery. The parish will worship on the first floor and is already renting out the third floor to a local university that has needed classroom space. No pews. No space that can't be reconfigured for another use. 

The experience of hearing these and other relationships that worshipping communities have to their buildings makes me wonder about the relationship I have to the churches I have known. I have always been drawn more to the altar than to the pulpit. I don't mind pews, although I have also come to love the chairs in our own chapel that allow us to form an oval for our worship at The Welcome Table. 

I realize, though, that the part of each building I have known as a priest and as a parishioner that holds the most significance is the front door. In years gone by, weddings would be held at the church's front door, at the threshold between the life of the village and the domain of the church. Weddings were considered village business and the church would have to meet the people halfway if it was going to fulfill its role. 

Church doorways are those liminal spaces that expand the frame of our belonging between the things we can see of this world and that which is beyond what our eyes alone can perceive. They also remind us that as followers of a God who so loved the world, we are called to position our life as a church at the threshold, asking from one generation to the next how it is we might move to meet that world halfway.

That is the vocational task before all of us as we discern the future of the church on our own city block, set as it is at the threshold of the city of Atlanta and beyond. Hold Sunday May 5 on your calendar as we take stock together of where that discernment has got to and please continue to pray for the wisdom and will to pursue all that God calls us forward into.