Having Church

“The perfect church service,would be one we were almost unaware of.
Our attention would have been on God.”
~C.S. Lewis

"Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf."
~1 Corinthians 10:17

Heat does not begin to explain the sensation we felt as we began to dig the post holes for the new church. It was only 8:00 in the morning but it already felt like the sun would do quick work of our sunscreen and send us back to our families crisper than the skin on last Thanksgiving's bird. As we continued we saw a man who looked familiar walking from the center of the village towards our job site. He was dressed in work clothes. Jeans, a tshirt, a ball cap to protect his eyes from the punishment of the sun. He approached the foreman and asked what he could do to help. Then we realized who this was. It was the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in town. He had left his own work for the day to cross denominational lines and help build a church for a different sect. Some would say, he was batting for the other team that day.

On the other side of the lot, Stan sawed a board. He had arrived before the rest of the team and went to work doing whatever he could. In his late seventies, retired from the Car Sales business, he has decided not to spend his retirement sitting in a rocking chair or playing canasta, but rather to travel thousands of miles, to a place where he doesn't understand the language or the culture and give of himself to help build a church for people he will never meet.

As the morning grew on, we began to see a crowd gather around the site. Children began to walk up to us and peer inquisitively at the tools and work we were doing. Building the church meant lifting 1,000 lb walls and a man with a chainsaw cutting the trusses. We began to realize that if these children remained under foot for the next few days, we would have a very dangerous situation on our hands. If a wall slipped from it's brace or the man with the chainsaw missed his mark, we could have a tragedy. Genie had been on a mission team to the Amazon three years before. A Speech Therapist from Dallas, it was truly beautiful to watch her round up the children and spend the following days playing with them. Learning the Spanish words for animals and teaching the group of 10-20 children that clung to her, the English words. In her broken Spanish she would tell them about Jesus. That Jesus loved them, that Jesus was the reason that we were there.

Cassie, a 14 year old from Louisiana, saw her God through new eyes, through the eyes of those free from the distractions I talked about in my last post. She saw her Faith as more than a religion but as a global force bringing freedom and hope to the world.

Lisa, a nurse from Alexandria, treated a baby with flee bites all over her body and a man whose hand was attacked by a piranha.

When someone approached the Pastor from the Prespyterian Church and asked him, "Why have you left your work to help us build this church today?" He replied, "We are one people with a very large work." He saw that "Church" was more than the evening service, was more than the songs we sing or words we preach. It is more than the four walls that were lifted into place in Tamshiyacu last week. Church is believers who are glorifying God, not simply with hymns and special music. Not with great homiletics. Church is what took place last week. We had church when the Pastor of a different denomination worked to built another persons church, when the car salesman picked up a saw beside an 18 year old Peruvian boy and showed him how to cut a straight line, when the mother of a baby with bites on her stomach and back was treated with compassion and respect, regardless of her financial position, marriage status or ethnic background.

We had church last week along the Amazon.