When I walked back into the University of West London on Sunday morning, it has been 202 days, 19 hours and 30 minutes (roughly) since I had left the building on the 15th of March after our normal Sunday service. If I’m honest I wasn’t quite sure what to expect! I knew the rules, I knew that people had signed up, I knew that there was going to be a lot of setup to do and a lot of praying that all the technology would work, but I didn’t quite know how it would feel. If I’d been asked to try and sum up what I expected to be like, I would have probably boiled it down to one word, I expected it to be WEIRD.
And at first, my expectation was met. It was a little weird to be wearing a mask and having to follow a one way system, or to be printing out a list of those who had booked tickets, and seeing chairs spaced out with unnatural gaps and in no discernible pattern. But after a while, once the strangeness had worn off, I began to see what this was, it was something I had missed for a long time. This was CHURCH.
Now this is not to say that the last 28 weeks have been completely church free! As someone who works full time at Redeemer I can confidently say that church has not stopped for a second during the pandemic. We have shared great times of prayer together, built community, and enjoyed fantastic worship times and preaching series online on Sunday mornings! But this Sunday was a fantastic reminder for me that the church is about PEOPLE.
Not just faces on a screen, or names in a contact list, but real people! People who turned up early to make sure that there were signs pointing people in the right direction, people who plugged in cables and set up cameras so that others could tune in online. People who sat with kids on their knees, or stood and raised hands, all the while desperately trying not to break into song! People who came to dedicate their Sunday morning, and the whole rest of their lives, to GOD.
Now I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t at all weird… There are certainly aspects of Sunday which I hope don’t catch on, and I’ve greeted enough people with a strange elbow touch now to know that I definitely don’t want to do that ever again. But the sight of others raising their hands in worship, the quiet “Amens” of appreciation as Pete preached about grace, the friendly faces walking past after the service, they all transformed a morning which started off a little weird into a glorious celebration of the people of God gathered together again.
It was a Redeemer Family reunion. And I LOVED IT.
