Three Words of Hope for the Church in Transition

The words came out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying: “This is the only conversation that matters right now in the church.”

I was teaching my adult Bible class Sunday morning, continuing a slow verse-by-verse exposition and discussion of 1 Thessalonians. The first few verses of chapter 3 seemingly jumped off my iPad with relevance to the current state of the church in America. There, Paul is commending the Thessalonians for their model faith amid persecution, their enthusiastic embrace of the gospel despite too-little tutelage from Paul and the other apostles. He marvels that they’ve held on, that they’ve kept the faith.

And it struck me that here, in one of the earliest written descriptions of life inside one of the first Christian churches, we are challenged to consider what is the essence of being church. If we want to figure out what is “essential” about church, this is a good place to look.

God knows, COVID has stripped us down to a new openness to this conversation — a conversation I, for one, was not willing to have before.