God gave us a community to do this following Jesus thing with and that community is called Church. And, in some ways church is like a group exercise class at your local gym. We’re together, working, and learning from each other and an instructor the art and science of following Jesus and loving Him and people well. Let me know what you think! Send this one over to your friends and start your own discussion!

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Mentioned in this episode:

The book of Ephesians

The Message version of the Bible

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality by Donald Miller

Episode Transcript:

Intro

Alexis (00:44):   

Hi, this is Alexis Busetti and welcome to That Makes Total Sense!  So I

want to talk about church today. We’re going to get there in kind of a

roundabout way, but I want to talk about church.

So recently I was at the gym and I went to one of those

group exercise classes and it reminded me of church, which sounds crazy, but

follow me. So I was at one of those group exercise classes, you know the ones

I’m talking about. Even if they’re not in your regular workout routine, you

know the ones, you can do everything. Even at my gym they actually still offer

those like old school step aerobics classes. But you can do, you know,

kickboxing or yoga or now they have those new like aerial silk things that hang

from the ceiling. Anyway, I wasn’t doing any of those. Just so you know, this

particular class where I had this like epiphany was a barbell weight lifting

class. 

And this is, I’ve taken this class more than once and it’s

still usually leaves me sore like for days after.  Like so sore that I’m left asking myself what

in the world I did and I’m thinking, why did I cause myself such misery? But

anyway, it was in the middle of this barbell class (probably when I was trying

to mentally distract myself from my shaking muscles) I started realizing in a

lot of ways this was just like church. Okay – so minus the limping that I knew

was going to come afterwards, at least I hope. But this was like church.

So the subject of church has been heavy on my heart lately

because our family recently transitioned our church home. And I know that may

not sound like a huge deal to a lot of people. But the truth is that my husband

and I have been married – we have four kids – we’ve been married for over 16

years and we have only to two different local congregations over the course of

our entire lives together. Like even before we were married. So before we were

married and then through the first eight years or something, we were married, we

belonged to this particular church in our old state where we used to live. And

then when we moved to where we currently live, that’s actually when we changed

our membership. So we actually only moved churches at that time because we had

moved states. And so, I understand that’s kind of — we’re kind of an anomaly

as far as that goes, because going through this and talking with my friends,

you know, about their journeys and what does it look like to belong to a church

home for them. I realized that most people do tend to move a bit more than we

did, but that, that was just our story. 

So this transition for us, that started several months ago

really made me take a look a long, hard look at church in general, church as a

whole. I started to understand it in different ways. I started to really pray

and ask God about it. In fact, I was reading a bit of Don[ald] Miller this

morning. I love the book Blue Like Jazz

and he was talking about changing churches and said he read Ephesians like four

times in The Message version [of the

Bible]. And I’m like, Oh my goodness!