Roots

These pictures were taken in Rothenburg, Germany.

I don’t know how vines get started but I know how they continue. The roots of the vines find the tiny cracks in the building they’re climbing and they cling to those cracks. As the vine grows, sometimes the cracks get bigger and the roots go deeper; sometimes the vines just send out new roots to find new cracks so that eventually, the vine is held to the building by a bunch of shallow roots.

In class, we talked about how pop culture and the emerging church occur after the crack in our society – this crack has enabled changes to slowly take hold in our lives/societies/churches. Because new things have been able to grow, our theology is different and our culture is different which leads to our churches looking different. Like the vines that grow on the houses changing the look of the building over time, the moves in culture and theology are changing the look of the church.

We also discussed how church cannot exist outside of culture. The vines cannot exist without the building. The emerging church is willing to admit that without the “building,” they wouldn’t exist – they are accepting the fact that the church grows on, around, and in culture. Because of this, the emerging church is the viable face of our church in the future.

The church used to be where people connected to one another. Now, because of the increases in technology, we have a web of interconnectedness that spans the world. We’ve become a society like the vines on the buildings – our webbed roots may not run deep in very many places, but our web is strong enough to change the face of church.

For example:
--I attend Christian Assembly church because I like the singing, the preaching, the small group I’m in, the multitude of opportunities to serve, and the hexagonal sanctuary.
--I download the sermons from Montrose church because I like the preaching but felt a little awkward going there.
--I am a member of a church in Nashville, Tennessee because that’s the first church that I joined as an adult by choice (rather than due to working with the church). My sister and brother-in-law work there and it is my home church in spite of the less than stellar preaching of the head pastor – it is my home church because the people there love me and I love them.
--I consider the military chapel at the NATO headquarters in Belgium a second home and though I have not been there for two years, I know I could go visit and be welcomed back in excitement and open arms by those who still attend because I keep in touch with them on Facebook or through e-mail.
--My dad is an Anglican priest and whenever I go visit him in Virginia, I go to his church and the people in his parish think it’s wonderful.
--If we look at the church as not just a building but as relationships, then we can extend my church roots through at least 8 states and 10 countries.

I am connected to all of these churches and yet I only attend one church regularly. An honest assessment of my roots in each church body leads to the admission that none of the roots are deep. My roots in churches reach far rather than deep and yet I believe those roots are strong.

Even as I hold on to the belief that my shallow roots are strong, I long to have some roots that grow deep. I read somewhere that some trees cannot grow taller than their roots go deep and cannot grow wider than their roots spread out. I put this third photo upside down because I like how the tree growing into the sky looks like roots that are growing deep. If the roots grow in the direction of the sky, then they can go on forever – it reminds me that as my roots grow into God then they can go as deep as they need to. It’s not like God’s going to run out and no matter where I am, no matter what church I’m a part of, God is there. (This photo was taken here, in California.)