Conflicts

As many of us head to see family over the next week and month it can be a time of revisiting conflicts and old wounds.  Many people talk about churches as family. And while most folks use that language to express how people in churches care for each other, spend years in relationship, and welcome new folks its true that church “families” also experience conflicts and brokenness just like our families of origin.

One conflict we’re dealing with right now has to do with a scheduling overlap. Our book group  has read Looking after Minidoka: An American Memoir  byNeil Nakadate and now they are taking a field trip to the Nikkei Legacy Center. On the trip they will learn about experiences of people of Japanese ancestry in the west, especially looking at the sins of internment. This field trip is the same day as our annual church holiday bazaar.  Folks who go on the trip will be back in time for lunch at the bazaar and a couple hours of shopping. For the people who hold the bazaar as sacred this can feel like a minimization of the event they have loved and worked on for so many years.

It’s a  dilemma that can read like new people versus old people. A traditional event versus a recent small group. The whole versus the few. God doesn’t call us to us versus them. God calls us to lots of faithful expressions and lots of ways to be the community of faith. So we work on showing each other grace, on affirming the importance of the bazaar and the goodness of learning together. We show up for each other and recognize that each person has different needs.

We’ll continue to rub along, snagging each other and struggling to be in whole, healthy relationships that cross age, experience, ad background. It’s hard, it’s messy, but there is no better family than the church when we get this right.

-Eilidh