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OPINION| Joe Pelphrey: Expressing Joy Through Church; find it by turning to the Lord | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

OPINION| Joe Pelphrey: Expressing Joy Through Church; find it by turning to the Lord | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Given the persistent media mention of declining religious affiliation and church attendance in the United States, one might be tempted to accept this as the only truth about religion in America, even in one’s own church. And yet the Psalmist points us in another direction. We are reminded that joy does not depend on a certain human image, but on turning to the Lord:

In the morning I will turn my prayer to you and look up. (Psalm 5:3)

… my soul will rejoice in the Lord, it will rejoice in His salvation.

(Psalm 35:9)

Accepting God’s many promises and assurances helps us keep our focus on the “spiritual story of the living church,” a theme that echoed through my church’s annual meeting last summer. I thought it meaningful to consider the following search questions shared at that recent meeting.

When it comes to the bigger picture of churches here in the United States, are we looking down into a mortal sense of things or are we looking up into infinity?

What narrative are we telling ourselves? Is it a story of decline based on numbers, or the spiritual story of the living church, where growth toward God is immeasurable?

“Looking up” in thought and prayer recently, I gratefully recalled an example from a few years ago of the effect of joy in the church.

One weekday afternoon, a fellow churchgoer and I were preparing for our Sunday service by practicing our sermon and Bible readings. I remember both of us being excited to speak God’s Word. Absorbed in the Word, we did not notice a young couple who entered the back of the hall, listened a little, and then left.

The same couple attended service the following Sunday. After the service, the couple told me that when they stopped by the church that previous afternoon, they felt a real sense of joy, and that they felt it again during the service on Sunday. Then they said they wanted to join our congregation. Well, you can imagine how excited we all were to accept them with open arms!

This young couple — our new friends — served in many capacities in the church for two whole years until they moved out of state.

Turning my gaze to the glory of God has enabled me to be filled with joy that naturally blesses. I was simply trying to express love, which has always been the real appeal of Christianity.

We, together as a church, find, along with our neighboring congregations, that at its heart, the church is much more than a building where we gather for spiritual nourishment each week. We begin to experience the church as a living expression of our love for God and our fellow man—alive with joy in our hearts and activated by our desire to bring the healing and saving power of Christ to our communities.