As I turned the page, my pupils began to expand in adjustment to the gradual dimming of the room. They must have overcompensated, though, because they began to contract, and then expanded again, as though they were trying to find their balance but kept falling forward or backward. After about the third round of this I finally noticed what was going on.

For a good two minutes I watched—is that even the right word?—as my pupils wavered back and forth indecisively. It was a miracle. It occurred to me that my pupils’ muscles tighten and relax thousands of times in a day, but I only ever notice it when someone points a flashlight in my eyes.

My sense of wonder withers away when all of my experiences fit inside the constructs of what I’m used to. At four months old I wondered that I could move my hand in front of my face, and at six years old I wondered that I could catch a fish from a pond with a worm on a hook. These are each legitimate miracles, but they’ve become ordinary to me.

It’s only when I become aware of these constructs that I can again experience wonder at the common things of life. In these moments I realize, with a clarity that comes so rarely and leaves so soon, that life is full of miracles and that all the ordinariness comes from me. How much of it do I miss?

A guy named Rob was speaking at camp that week, and during that evening’s session he told us a little bit about the church he pastored called Two Rivers Church. I had been at one church my whole life at that point, and the things he said intrigued me. Community-focused small groups. A monthly picnic at a park in an impoverished neighborhood, open to everyone. It sounded pretty cool.

Then, as if anticipating my thoughts, he said: “You may be thinking this church sounds pretty cool and you want to check us out. You’re welcome to come and visit, but I’ll warn you ahead of time: We don’t want you. If you want to go to a church because it’s cool, this isn’t the place for you. If you go to Two Rivers, we expect you to get involved with us in our mission.”

A church that had expectations of its members? Rob’s ten-minute description of Two Rivers that evening lingered in the back of my mind during the next few years as I was developing my church theology at Emmaus Bible College.

In August of 2009, six years after the Lifehouse concert, Amanda and I moved to Des Moines. We brought with us a list of churches we wanted to visit in our search for a new ecclesiastical home, and we agreed that we’d go to each of them at least once before we made our decision. Well, we went to Two Rivers the first Sunday, and our search ended on the same day it began. We knew immediately that it was the one and that it’d be a waste of time to even look anywhere else.

Over the coming weeks, we learned that 2009 had been a year of big changes for Two Rivers: in March, they had unexpectedly merged with another small church in the area called Echo Park. Josh, the pastor of Echo Park, had been developing a friendship with Rob over the previous few years. One day near the end of ‘08, Josh felt God tell him very clearly: merge with Two Rivers. It was a crazy idea—both churches were healthy and growing, and merging churches isn’t something pastors just do for kicks. But out of obedience to God, Josh brought it up to Rob over coffee.

After a long discussion, they decided that they would take a few weeks to pray about it. Rob felt that the only way this would work is if the two churches complemented each other’s strengths and weaknesses, so to that end, he came up with a list of ten important character qualities for a pastor. They were to each rank their qualities from 1 to 10, with 1 being the strongest and 10 being the weakest.

When Rob and Josh met again, they compared their ranked lists: Josh’s number 1 was Rob’s number 10… Josh’s 2 was Rob’s 9. This pattern continued down the list until Josh’s number 10 was Rob’s number 1. With one or two minor exceptions, their lists were inverted. The very next month they held their first church service together.

The merge was complementary. They decided to keep the name Two Rivers Church since it had been around longer than Echo Park and had more recognition in the community. They kept Echo Park’s location at Callanan Middle School because it was closer to the part of the city that the church wanted to reach. And Rob and Josh became co-pastors together, alternating preaching each week and dividing up the pastoral responsibilities between them.

If a church division is the highest display of disunity, then a merge must be the highest display of unity; but while I’ve seen many churches divide, I’d never seen a merge before now. Praise God for obedience.

We in the youth group went our separate ways after graduating, but in the past year two of us have ended up in Des Moines, and we are once again at the same church. Christy and her husband Kyle started coming to Two Rivers a few months after Amanda and I, and as we introduce them to our friends, someone always asks how we know each other. Well, we’ve known each other our whole lives, I say; but each time I say it, it sinks in a little bit more how unusual this is.

Owing to our culture’s lifestyle of moving across the country every few years in pursuit of a job, as well as our intrinsic divisiveness, it’s rare for someone to remain at the same church through his childhood and adolescence. But my experience at Bethany was by no means unique. Our family photo album contains pictures of me as a baby playing with other babies (including Christy) with whom I would graduate eighteen years later; all in all, there were maybe five of us within a year of each other who were together from the nursery to the last day of high school youth group.

Christy and I have reminisced about our upbringings, and one of the many things we share in common is that we know the Bible better than just about anyone we’ve met outside of Bethany. We had the benefit of a phenomenal Sunday school program that covered just about every story in the book, and we were both involved in something called Bible Quiz which is essentially competitive Bible memorization. Add to this our Bible-centered summer camp and Wednesday night kids’ club, and you understand.

But Bible knowledge is only one aspect of our rich experience growing up at Bethany Bible Chapel. The picture I mean to paint is that Bethany provided a solid church environment for raising a family. In my generation, there are dozens more who attended Bethany for as long as Christy and I did because their parents understood this. And though life has led most of us away from that particular gathering of Christians, many have gone on to work for the Kingdom in such diverse roles as church planters, Bible college professors, and full-time youth camp staff—as well as nurses, software developers and waitresses, whose work is equally valuable to the Kingdom if it is done in the name of Christ.

Next to God and good parents, it was the dedication of the Sunday school teachers and the camp counselors and the Bible Quiz coaches and the youth leaders that made us who we are.

To that end, in April of 2007 we started an event called Grab a Brew, Share Your View. The premise was this: we met at a bar downtown on the second Tuesday of each month, and in an open-mic format we discussed topics of faith for about an hour and a half. After that, we moved into a group discussion where the rule was that you had to get with the person you most disagreed with. By the end of the night you’d have a new friend and a better understanding of his perspective.

Before we even held the first event (”What’s Wrong with Christianity?” was the topic), the freethinkers group at the University of Northern Iowa saw a flyer on campus and approached our pastor, Brooks, about co-sponsoring the event. Since that time, Grab a Brew has been a cooperative effort between Kaio and UNIFI. We’ve explored a variety of topics from religion to ecology to disasters, with monthly attendance ranging from as low as 10 to as high as 100 in its three-year history.

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. (Acts 17:16-17)

Kaio Church stands out as the only church I’ve been to that engages the culture head-on as Paul did in Athens: by meeting them where they are. Our pastor Brooks did not wait for them to come to us and to fill our church services, but instead he took us to to them. And in everything, he led by example. We didn’t know how to engage the culture; he moderated the event. We were hesitant to make friends; he invited them over to his house every week. A lot of people have been changed as a result.

It was never easy or safe, but what part of following Jesus is?

During the four months we were down there, we went to Amanda’s home church, Fairbluff Bible Chapel, a church of about 100 members. Interestingly, though Fairbluff is located in the middle of Charlotte, most of the families who attend do not live in Charlotte proper, with some of them driving up to an hour to meet on Sunday.

Charlotte has a considerable Hispanic and Latin American population. A few years ago, some immigrants from Honduras and Colombia started attending Fairbluff because it was the only Plymouth Brethren church in the area and that was the type of church they went to back home. But they barely knew any English. One of the members at Fairbluff was fluent in Spanish from his years as a missionary, so he offered to translate the sermons as they were preached.

Then more Spanish-speakers started coming. Within a year or two, the Spanish-speaking group at Fairbluff had grown to about ten, including a few who had been church leaders in their home country. The elders at Fairbluff suggested that these people start a Spanish-language service and graciously offered the church gym as a meeting place. Now there are 20 or 30 of them and their ministry is flourishing.

But the Spanish-speakers did not split off and form their own autonomous church. That’s the best part. They remained a part of Fairbluff, and everyone still meets together on Sunday mornings. I should explain here that Plymouth Brethren have an open-format meeting where anyone is free to pray, share a thought, or suggest a hymn as they feel led by the Holy Spirit to worship. And at Fairbluff, a song or devotional thought in English may be followed by a prayer or Bible reading in Spanish, though almost no one understands the other language and there is not a translator. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that a group of Christians are gathered to worship in the name of Jesus Christ, and worship transcends language barriers.

Fairbluff stands as a shining example of adaptation. They saw an opportunity from God, and they took that opportunity even though it meant changing the way they’ve been doing things for many years. And it was not without its cost: in the past six or seven years, Fairbluff’s English-speaking attendance has seen a decline in numbers. But the Spanish language ministry continues to grow! They are able to meet the needs of a demographic that Fairbluff had always been surrounded by, but until recently had been unable to reach. The city of Charlotte is ripe for the harvest.

The first week I went to Great Adventure, I was shocked when it came time for the offering near the end of the service. The person administering the offering gave the usual introduction saying that the Bible commands us to give our money back to God, but then he added that if anyone had need, they should not feel obligated to give—rather, they should feel free to take money from the basket as it was passed by. They said this every Sunday without any guidelines or restrictions. They had no way of knowing if anyone took money or how much. But in the two years I went to Great Adventure, they never had any financial problems.

This is not a practice that every church should, or even could, adopt. It would be ineffective at a larger church, and it would be abused at an inner-city church. But Great Adventure knows its people—poor college students, many of whom have gone far into debt to study the Bible—and meets them where they are. Just as we entrust God with our money by letting go of it every Sunday, the leaders at Great Adventure entrust God’s money to those who need it by giving it back.

I want to point out in advance that my purpose in this is not to say that all churches should do all of these things, or that if an aspiring church planter were to combine all of the “good parts” he’d end up with the optimal church. No, that church would have more faults than any of these! Rather, the optimal church strives to be only what God has called them to be, resisting the lures of comparison and conformity to other churches. The optimal church meets the unique needs of their congregation and their community, and this will look different for every local gathering.

So as I profile these churches, understand that it’s not a prescription for success, only a celebration of excellence.

I’m all the time being asked by people, “How do you feel closer to God?” And I kind of always want to say, “I don’t know.” When I read the lives of most of the great saints, they didn’t necessarily feel very close to God. When I read the Psalms I get the feeling like David and the other Psalmists felt quite far away from God for most of the time. Closeness to God is not about feelings. It’s about obedience. … I don’t know how you feel close to God. And no one I know who seems to be close to God knows anything about those feelings either. I know if we obey, occasionally the feeling follows. Not always, but occasionally. I know that if we disobey, we don’t have a shot at it.

Jesus said, “Whatever you do to the least of these, my brothers, you’ve done it unto me”, and that is what I’ve come to think: if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my Savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor.

This, I know, will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved, and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.

—Rich Mullins, from a concert in Lufkin, TX on July 19, 1997, two months before he was killed in a car accident

I will continue to post quotes during this time off, maybe more often than normal. Other people say things better than I can anyway.

I’ve added a “Subscribe by Email” link to the top navigation as well. If you want, you can get all of this delivered by email as soon as it’s written. You can also use a RSS client or add it to your Google homepage (among other options) by visiting this link.

• One does because he’s weak. He doesn’t understand that he’s free, but he does it anyway.
• One doesn’t because he knows he’s weak. He is beginning to understand freedom, but knows he’s not strong enough to engage in the activity.
• One does because he’s strong. He understands his freedom in Christ and knows that there is good in all things.
• One doesn’t because he’s disciplined and doesn’t need to. “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable.”

etc.

The problem is that when I see another Christian act differently than me, I will usually assume that I am a level beyond him in maturity rather than a level behind. This is why there are so many conflicts over the “gray areas” in the Christian life.