Easily Edified by Dennae Pierre

“A mature Christian is easily edified." I heard that phrase from a pastor a few weeks ago and it has been stuck in my mind. Our western culture is so dominated by consumerism and individualism, and this massively shows up in our weekend corporate worship. Consumerism surrounds us like a thick cloud and can easily taint the way we approach our services each weekend. 

Do we enter His gates to sing thanksgiving and praise? Or do we enter and evaluate how well we like the music, whether the sermon moved us enough, and/or if we connected with the people that we wanted to? It is easy, almost without even thinking, to move right into critique: What did we like? What didn't we like? What could we have done better?  All of this is rooted in the assumption that what we think, experience, and feel is what is most important. 

As Roosevelt is on the search for a worship leader, we don't know if our guest musicians are candidates for a position or just helping us out for a few weeks because they are friends of someone on our leadership team. This means, every week, there is this tendency to enter our music with our critiquing eyes on. But at the end of the day, we only have fifty-two days this year that we get to gather with our family, be taught corporately, and sing words that remind us of Jesus’s love. Are there weeks where the music is.... difficult on our ears? Does our preacher kill it with every illustration? Are our graphics always top-of-the-line? 

No. I can say that our leadership is constantly striving to do the best they can with the resources we have. We seek excellence, but not to appease ourselves or make life more comfortable. We seek excellence as part of our worship: we want our music, preaching, liturgy, visuals to be done to the best of our ability because we love Jesus and want to give Him the best that we have. So what is our role, if we are members and participating in our corporate worship service? 

Our role is to come, commune with our family, enjoy the unique things that make our family quirky, pray for the Lord to continue to tune our ears, eyes, and hearts to Him, and not allow consumerism to cloud our vision. Things will be off; we will always need to improve, but mature Christians are easily edified. We delight in simple phrases. We allow our hearts to be stirred by glimmers of beauty. We show up to serve our family, to delight in fellowship with our brothers and sisters, to actively welcome guests to our family gathering, to thank the Lord corporately for the unique tapestry of lives He has woven together at Roosevelt Community Church and to actively pray that He would make us more pure, more loving, and a more faithful church—a  church that is ravished by God's unending love and actively participating in the great work He has called us to.