Springwood Presbyterian Church: Whitsett, NC

Greetings in the name of the Lord, to the Saints of Springwood!

 I’ve been reflecting on summertime church attendance.   As is the case in many churches, it’s been somewhat lower this summer than in winter “prime time”, but Springwood’s overall worship attendance is a higher percentage of membership than is common today in most “mainline” churches.  I’m glad, not only because I love looking out on your smiling faces, but even more because I believe we are “hard-wired” for worship—something in us yearns to praise God, to pray, to hear God’s word in speech and song—and, while we can worship God in the privacy of our own homes or out on the beach, there is something very powerful about worshipping together with other Christians, joining our voices in song, our hearts in prayer, our minds in meditation and reflection.  So, I offer you two items I’ve come across recently: one, from CS Lewis’ Beyond Personality, and the second off the internet:

Lewis: “If you want to get warm, you must stand by the fire; if you want to be wet, you must get into the water.  If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.  They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.  They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality. …  Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.  But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him, everything else thrown in.”

And from that other great source of information and commentary, the World Wide Web: 

A church goer wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper complaining that it made no sense to go to church every Sunday.  “I’ve gone for 30 years now,” he wrote, “and in that time, I have heard something like 3,000 sermons.  But for the life of me, I can’t remember a single one of them!  So I think I’m wasting my time and the pastors are wasting theirs by giving sermons at all.”  Signed: Missing the Message.   

This started a big controversy in the “Letters to the Editor” column, much to the delight of the editor and publisher.  It went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher:

“I’ve been married for 30 years now.  In that time, my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals for me.  But for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of these meals.  But I do know this: they all nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do my work.  If my wife had not given me these meals, I would be physically dead today.  Likewise, if I had not gone to church for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today.  When you are DOWN to nothing…God is UP to something!  Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible, and receives the impossible!  Thanks be to God for our physical AND spiritual nourishment.”

May you receive the nourishment you need for spiritual growth at Springwood!  Dale