The church is not a building;
The church is not a steeple.
The church is not a resting place;
The church is a people.
As the traditional hymn above says, the church is not a building.
Buildings are made by man. They are built with bricks and mortar. They crumble and decay. We try to build our temples to reach heaven, but God only laughs.
The church is the body. As Paul says in Romans, we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Christ is the head of the church. We are the body.
This Sunday Communion Church moves as a body into a new building with quite a history. A building that, in 1923, Swedish and Finnish pioneers who were new to America built with their hands as part of Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church. Worship services were held in the basement of the building at Third and Snoqualmie for five years before the sanctuary was finished. Sermons were delivered in Swedish until 1936 by men named M.L. Swanson, Carl Lund, Oliver Nelson. Those men and others led a flock that serves God and the community of Mount Vernon to this day.
Sixteen years ago Salem Lutheran Church moved to a new building on LaVenture and sold their old building to a small church plant named The Gathering. An idealistic group of young men and women poured their energy and their lives into the property and God breathed new life into an aging structure.
The church quickly became the talk of Mount Vernon as kids showed up from all corners of the Valley and beyond to hear the Gospel preached in a new way, to pray with their friends and to study their Bible with a ferocious zeal. On a Friday you could catch an all-age rock concert within the building’s walls — Damian Jurado and David Bazan on the same bill, anyone? — and on Sunday praise Jesus with a worship team that overflowed with musical talent. The Gospel was preached; lives were changed; God was glorified.
But a crack formed. Then things crumbled. And a split. God scattered many of the members of The Gathering, which limped on and found its bearing under a new pastor. The changed lives that left went on to change other lives in Mount Vernon and beyond. The musical talent that left went on to lead worship at a number of other churches. Some of those that left went on to plant churches. Leaders who had helped build The Gathering were redeemed and able to use their gifts to build up new bodies.
One of those people is Jim Fikkert, the pastor of Communion Church, which will hold its first service at the building at Third and Snoqualmie this Sunday at 10 a.m. Jim attended The Gathering for five years. He met his wife Esther at The Gathering. He received pre-marital counseling by an elder at The Gathering. He and Esther were married in the sanctuary he will now preach in.
“When I went to The Gathering I had no intention of being a pastor; no desire to be a pastor,” says Jim. “It was my local church. I served there. I lit candles on Sunday night and watched kids once a month. I had a small role in a body of people.”
God had much larger plans. Searching for a home church eight years ago, Jim found Damascus Road Church in Marysville. Soon after he became an elder at DR, began preaching regularly and three years ago he was called to lead a church plant in the town he grew up. That plant would become Communion Church, which began meeting at the Lincoln Theater in downtown Mount Vernon in September, 2011. God has blessed Communion Church and slowly a core of eight families has grown to more than 100 congregants.
But like buildings, people change through the passage of time. They pick up, move on, start over. God has healed many wounds and through His graciousness there has been forgiveness since the split at The Gathering. A number of members at Communion Church were a part of The Gathering. A few of them peripherally: they saw a show once at The Gathering, got married there, visited once with a friend. Some attended the church. They remember mowing the lawn, watching kids in the school, re-roofing the parsonage. For others the connection is much deeper and the road back much steeper.
“People who were pastors at The Gathering are now congregants (of Communion Church),” says Jim, “and people who were servants in that church are now pastors.”
But this is not The Gathering. There are many people who are members or in leadership at Communion Church who, until this Sunday, have never stepped foot in the building. This will be their building as well.
But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed. — 2 Corinthians 4:7-9
A church is not a building.
But like a building that withers over time, we deteriorate and break down. We sag and rot. We crumble from within and our minds corrode. We become shells of our former glory and shattered versions of our once proud youth. Our best is broken. We try to hold something we cannot hold; do something that we cannot do; reveal something that we cannot reveal.
“The church really is the people,” Jim says. “There is a beauty of seeing people fail and change but come back to God. Those who survive to the end, Jesus says, are the faithful. Those who fail and go back to Jesus and fail and go back to Jesus are the ones who knew who they were going back to in the first place.”
The church is not a building, but the body does need a building. The church is the people, but in the life of a church people change. People leave; people come. Not just the body of the church changes, but the people themselves change. Lives become intertwined in moments of time, only to break apart the next. But like a through line in any good story, God is the standard in our life that as we change and things change He stays the same.
There are things in our lives that can act as that constant. The building that will now house Communion Church is for many people in this community one of those constants. For others this is just a building. It’s not our job to define it.
“This place is a building and all buildings have a history. But people also have a history,” says Jim. “This is a building that a lot of people have history with that intersects at a lot of different places. This is just that next step where they intersect. This isn’t the pinnacle.”
The Gathering held its final service on June 29 and Communion Church will gather for the first time in the building on Sunday, meaning the large, Gothic wooden doors will not be shut even one week. God has made sure that there is no interruption in His mission. The music may be in a different key and the message a new voice, but the same Gospel will be preached on Sunday as it has since the sanctuary was finished nearly 80 years ago.
“This is the next step on the journey of our church,” Jim says. “This building is a part of a lot of people’s stories in a lot of different directions. And now it’s part of ours.”
“Some of us for the second time.”
To support Communion Church as they make this transition, go to: http://www.gofundme.com/Communion-Re-Launch.