As Christians, we need to both bless our good “unchurch” friends and let ourselves be blessed by them. I am not comfortable with the term “unchurch” a reference to folks who no longer attend Mass on Sunday. However, when I research the internet, the labels include jargon like atheist, dechurched, or worse pagan.
I have friends who aren’t professed agnostics or atheists, but they don’t exactly fit the description of a practicing Christian either. They rarely go to church, mostly disregard church teachings, pray only when in crisis, and are basically too immersed in life here-and-now to think much about God, church, and eternity.
But, even so, I love them dearly because they radiate life, sometimes in ways that shame me. There’s something about them that’s very right, inspiring even. They are volunteer firefighters, a grandparent providing legal custody of their grandchildren, or caregivers to elderly neighbors and family. Their presence brings positive energy, goodness, love, intelligence, humor, and sunshine into a room.
Don’t get this wrong: this is not to imply that those who do go to church and try to follow the church’s rules are hypocrites and immature, while those who don’t go to church and make their own rules are the real Christians. No. There’s nothing enlightened about people drifting away from the church, thinking they are beyond church, living outside its rules, or believing that a passionate focus on this life justifies a neglect of the other world. That’s a fault in wisdom and maturity.
However, the wonderful energy that we see, and should bless, in the many good persons we know who no longer go to church with us is precisely that, wonderful energy, not depth. But it’s on the right side of things, on the side of life. It’s wonderful, it helps bring God into a room, and it should be blessed.
And that’s why, as Christians, we need to both bless our good “unchurch” friends and let ourselves be blessed by them. God is the ultimate author of all that’s good, whether that goodness, sunlight, energy, color, and warmth is seen inside a church building or outside of it.
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends, bless my unchurch friends, at their energy, their generosity, their warmth, what they bring into a room, and my heart lifts and I believe in God more deeply. God also made their sunshine and their warmth. They don’t go to church, and our faith community sadly misses their energy and spirit, but they’re on the side of life and that implicit faith, is a challenge for me to remain too on the right side of things.
