Supper Club

Our supper club started out as triage for the brokenhearted. 

Born of a need to simplify the outsized "community groups" of our local church, there are just six of us - three married couples - and we came to the table wounded, or tired, or both.

We meet just once a month, and we rotate homes. It's easy on the hosts and we look forward to every carefully planned dinner, every meaningful conversation.

If I could tell you what we have weathered together over the past 20 months as a supper club, you might find yourself in our stories. You might understand the despair that catches the faithful completely off-guard and threatens to take us under into a suffocating death that sees the end of lifetimes spent in churches and church communities. The threat has palpably edged its way into each of our six lives, and it seems that just as one of us comes up for air, another is brought down under its weight, plunging and flailing and gasping to inhale some oxygen. 

We are the supper club of the struggling.

What makes that pronouncement odd is the fact that we are, each of us, somehow tied to ministry, either currently or in the recent past. We aren't supposed to be the ones who struggle. We're supposed to be the people who are firm in our faith, solid in our theology, and unwavering as we serve and encourage and carry the load for others. Instead, we've found a safe place to wrestle with doubt and discouragement.

We don't expect to have all the answers. I think that's why I love these five other people the most. When I unleash my deepest struggles into sharp, tangled words, there is no condemnation. There is a genuine desire to understand and to question and to remind me of the truth, but there is no judgment. No one walks away, gets into their car and talks about me as if there is some ethereal or actual spiritual ranking in place and I have just bumped my way down the rungs to level zero. I don't walk away doing the same. 

It's desirable and healthy to be able to say the hard stuff. It's right and good that we should be safe places for others to do so. If you want a supper club like that, be the supper club like that. When we are real, when we show our true hurt, when we share the hardest, ugliest sides and imperfections, something beautiful happens: we free others to do the same. We become the safe place, and soon we realize that the shiny, polished, all-together people are the ones who hurt the most. 

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This Week's Read: Godspeed

Sometimes as believers, just figuring out why God has us where He has us is half the battle, isn't it? A young mom might feel trapped and useless in and amidst days overflowing with diapers and the ever-present dirt and mess that accompanies the raising of small children. At the same time, the truck driver nearing retirement age might be struggling to understand why a door to reaching others around him seems firmly shut. 

The dentist can feel largely ineffective, as can the clothing store manager, the teacher, and the college student. If each of us is supposed to be living with a mission in mind, what exactly does that look like right here, where God has me today?

Affiliate links below. Disclosure here.

I'd been a fan of pastor Britt Merrick's sermons and books when Godspeed: Making Christ's Mission Your Own was released. Britt had been preaching through the pain of the loss of his own daughter Daisy to cancer, and we were battling our personal ills at the time, as well. God let Britt step into our lives just when we needed to hear what he was saying. 

But when Godspeed launched, the Merricks were deep into Daisy's fight with the cancer that eventually claimed her life, and Godspeed went quietly into the bookstores with not a lot of fanfare.

That's unfortunate because Godspeed: Making Christ't Mission Your Own is an excellent, engaging, tightly constructed book that is appropriate and helpful reading for pretty nearly everyone. No joke. We chose to use it with our community group shortly after I read it the first time, and that group could not have been a more eclectic bunch. We were comprised of two middle-aged married couples, three college students, two single moms, two single women, and a high schooler. We had medical professionals, homeschooling moms, administrative assistants, baristas, and one woman awaiting a sentencing for a felony crime. And yet, Godspeed spoke to each of us, individually, right where we were.

Would you, too, like to know how you can be a part of the grand and beautiful plan of redemption? How to recognize the unique mission God has given you? Be encouraged that you have been made for such a time as this? Start here. 

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We're All Messed Up, and I'm Not Just Saying That

Christendom is full of messed up, broken, needy people.

That guy you think for sure has all of his ducks in a tidy little row and singing out of the hymnal every Sunday morning and in church on time? He's messed up, too. I confidently know this and my expertise is backed up by decades of experience in a variety of churches, but then last week my husband Fletch and I spoke at a family camp all the way across the country and let me say this again in case you doubt: Christendom is full of messed up, broken, needy people.

The 600 people we hung out with at Sandy Cove's homeschool family camp were not more messed up and broken than any others, but like us, they are really good at the "shiny, happy people" masquerade. And then we got up on that stage on Monday morning and just put all our own messed up, broken, neediness out there, and it began what was at first a slow trickle of the broken, messed up, and needy moms, dads, brothers, and sisters that grew day by day into a deluge of the most sinful junk and yuck hidden beneath years of shiny, happy Christianity and laid bare at our feet. And we wept.

How have we missed the truth of the gospel in this? The truth that Jesus paid it all, just for us? The truth that He weeps over us, not because we are messed up, broken, and needy, but because He is the answer, the way, the truth, and the life, and we sit in our musty little corner polishing our shiny, happy people idols and missing all the fullness of everything He is. 

And aren't you tired of it all?

Laughing - Sandy Cove

After we spoke about shifting our hope off of Jesus Christ and onto, oh, everything and anything else, we followed up with a session on what it looks like when we live remembering how loved we are by God, and then a session on living confessionally, with all our stuff out there, living lives of authenticity, and then a big, loud, beautiful reminder of how very much loved by God we are.

Many of the people there were tired of it all.

They came wounded, bleeding, hemorrhaging. They waited by our door in the morning and grabbed us on the way to breakfast. They scooted their chairs next to us as the salad was just about to hit our lips. They even pounded on our door late one night in a last attempt to confess and break through the chains of addiction that had bound them for years and years and years. 

Cargo Net - Sandy Cove

And lest you be tempted to think it must just have been this wacky group of people out there in Maryland, let me reiterate: We're all messed up. And I'm not just saying that.

Isn't it grand? It is, because >>> Jesus <<<. Because the gospel. Because the truth that there is not one of us who does good except for our loving and generous and perfect savior, Jesus Christ, and we get to lean in, hide under his wings, and be seen by the God of the universe as complete and whole and not messed up.

How does that change the way we think about Jesus? About the good news of his death and resurrection? Does it make it truly good news? It makes it great news. Excellent news. Perfect love and grace for messed up, broken, needy people. Like me.

Sunset across the bay - Sandy Cove

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