The Pulse: Staying Home and Staying Connected

What does the word “home” mean to you? As a child, I remember how moving from one location and one house to another helped teach me that home meant the people in my family more than a building I lived in or the room I called my own. Even when we moved to an unfamiliar place, I still had a home with the people I loved.

This Sunday, we gathered in scattered locations to worship, pray, and hear from God’s word through a live stream online. (You can watch the video here.) Psalm 90 provided the focal point for our thoughts as we remembered that our God is our home, now and forever, and that through him we find security and significance in life beyond anything else we can experience.

I encouraged you to read Psalm 90 each day this week and, as I read that Psalm this morning, I noticed something I had missed before… the pronouns. In my translation of Psalm 90:

“Our” appears 11 times,
“We” appears 6 times,
“Us” appears 5 times.

I didn’t find “I,” “me,” or “mine” at all.

The simple way this Psalm communicates about community life rather than an individual perspective reminded me about what the church is. We don’t stop being the church just because we aren’t meeting in the same space on Sundays. The church is people, not a building. We are the church whether we gather physically or online, when we meet together as well as when we scatter into our community, when we gather in groups or are isolated in our homes.

We are working on ways to continue to effectively “be” the church by connecting with each other and serving one another and our community in a rapidly changing situation. In fact, today we followed new recommendations from the CDC and have extended our plans to gather online rather than physically on Sundays through April 10. To stay connected with GFC and keep exploring how we can “be” the church in this unique time, visit and consider bookmarking gfcnow.com/updates. This will help you stay connected as we connect and serve together.

Even in a rapidly changing situation, we can be certain that God is working in our community and that we are still his church together – even when practicing “social distancing.”

May God bless you and give you peace,

Titus