What Can Stand in the Way of the Church You Always Wanted?

On Sunday, Donna Burkland opened the sermon talking about going out to coffee with a friend who was processing her discontent with the church. At one point the friend said, “I feel like the church I want doesn’t exist yet.”

Have you ever felt that way? Do you have a sense of what that church would actually look like? What might it look like to actually be a part of creating a church like that?

As an exercise to bolster your imagination, let the following passage carry your mind away with possibilities. Through a bizarre set of circumstances out on a desert highway, the early church leader Philip has met an African political leader who, in today’s language, we would say was trans. After a robust conversation, this leader wanted to start following Jesus and understood that being baptized was an outward sign of being reborn into this new way of life. So what did this person do? They asked Philip to baptize them at the first oasis they came to in the middle of nowhere. There was no church building, there was no church gathering, there was no church theology about baptism! There was just Philip and his new trans friend figuring out how to follow the Holy Spirit and to be the church!

So read this passage and ask yourself how the Spirit might work in your life this week to be the church.

As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. - Acts 8:36-38