Faith Matters - Church in the Park

Standing (and kneeling) Together

Last week I made a visit at the nursing home to share communion with one of our longstanding church members. For some reason I invited the roommate of this friend to also share in the Lord’s Supper with us. I knew that this roommate was a longstanding member of the Christian Church and many people had testified of her love for Jesus. She immediately said she would like to join us. So we took a few minutes to transition her to a wheelchair and over to the other side of the room. While we were moving things around so we could all fit in a circle and share, the woman who was the member of our church asked the member of the Christian Church if she was comfortable taking communion from a Baptist minister. My new friend from the other church quickly responded, “I want to take the Lord’s Supper, and it doesn’t matter if it is with Baptists or whoever. We all believe in Jesus, right?”

This touched me. It touched me because when we shared the bread and the cup, and remembered Jesus’ dying on the cross for us, we were brothers and sisters in Christ. Our denominational labels, our age differences, our different stations in life did not matter. What mattered was that each of us had surrendered our lives to Jesus, and participated in the Lord’s Supper to remember the sacrifice of Christ. It was a tender moment. The presence of the Spirit was clearly noticed by each of us.

I left Fowler Health Care Center that evening a very thankful man. I was thankful for the experience that I had just had. Even more, I was thankful for the cooperation we share among the several churches in this community that participate in the Ministerial Alliance. Do we agree on everything? No we do not. We do, however, agree on the central beliefs of the Christian faith. Perhaps more important, we support one another.

I know of this support through personal experience. If I want to borrow a Bible commentary, I can walk a block and borrow one from Pastor Sniff. The Methodist Church women are helping our church with a mission project we are working on. When a member who lives next door to Pastor Josephson becomes ill, he calls me and lets me know. A couple of weeks ago, a member of the West Assembly of God Church helped my wife and I with an emergency need with our vehicle just as we were about to leave town on vacation, and asked nothing in return. Catholic friends make an effort to include me in community activities.

This Sunday the churches in the ministerial alliance celebrate our unity in Christ through our Missouri Day Service at 9:30 a.m. in the City Park. It is always a wonderful time. We have great worship singing. We will have some creative teaching. What will touch my heart, however, is to look around and see Methodists and Baptists, Catholics and Pentecostals, the Christian Church and the Lutheran Church choosing to sing together, pray together, teach together, and worship together as brothers and sisters in Christ. It will touch my heart because I believe this kind of gathering is a small glimpse of the kind of unity we will discover in heaven. In heaven, I believe, we will not be wearing labels that say “Baptist” or “Pentecostal”. We will all just be known as children of God.