When Church is Fun: Mid-Week Reflection

EMILY RUTLEDGE, YOUTH MINISTER

When Church is Fun.

I sometimes forget that not everyone’s entire life centers on parish life. It’s easy as a church worker to get sucked into the all-consuming nature of this work. Other people’s lives become part of your daily story. You know peoples ins and outs, their deepest secrets, their longings, their failures, and their dog’s names. Even before I was a minister I was rooted in strong faith communities. The parish I grew up in filled my extra time: church softball, bbqs, and babysitting. Everything was rooted in church.

This meant there was no way to ‘be’ at church for me because in one way or another I was always at church, surrounded by church people, or at my Episcopal Church school. I am basically admitting to you that I am a serious church nerd. With the church so rooted in my daily life it makes it hard to figure out where the line is between ‘my life’ and ‘my work’. Church and its people have always been my safe place. I am blessed by that fact. There are many people who have had the opposite experience and church is a place with a history of pain and exclusion. As we strive to love all that walk through our doors it is easy to focus on the details of parish life when the reality of belonging means more than any program or Eucharistic detail. The parishes I have belonged to that have been the most formative and life changing for me have been a wide array of things: low and high church, large and small, urban and rural... yet all have had one thing in common.

They were fun.

I couldn’t pinpoint it until a few months ago when a friend was sharing his hopes for what church would be. He said, “I need them to know that church and God are FUN.”

There is so much pain, healing, and hope that we each need and as we travel this life as a community. When we are sure that there is an aspect of fun, healing, respite to our communal lives church changes from something we do to something we are.

This season for our parish is precious. Our rector is on a well-deserved and needed sabbatical, we are welcoming Kathleen as our associate, and we are rethinking how we are as a community. Wednesday dinners will soon mark all of our calendars as adults and small people join in on the secret the youth community has known all along… eating together is critical. We are breathing in the summer air, preparing for a parish retreat, and reclaiming FUN as part of who we are.

And I couldn’t be happier about it.