For 11 years now, my family has attended a very ordinary church. The building is nondescript, with clean, old red carpet, furniture donated when members were upgrading their living rooms and various works of mediocre spiritual art. The service is standard, with a call to worship and a prayer of confession and some hymns that soar and others that stumble. The people are your everyday sorts, with teachers and plumbers and electricians and secretaries sitting in the pews.

I write that it is all ordinary, but of course, as C.S. Lewis once put it, “There are no ordinary people.” The only people we encounter are those created in the image of God, those formed and shaped with the purpose of participating in God’s work of redemptive love in and among us. And so, when those very ordinary people gather for an ordinary service in an ordinary building on an ordinary Sunday morning, it can become something quite extraordinary.

Our pastor was out of town a few weeks ago, so she asked me to lead the service. I stood up front and looked to the pews as Joan, age 89, passed Communion to our daughter Marilee, age 12. Nearly eight decades apart, they looked each other in the eye before they shared the broken body and blood of Christ. When I stood in the pulpit to receive people’s prayer requests, I noticed a visiting family with a daughter with Down syndrome. Our daughter Penny is 17, and she also has Down syndrome. In the past few years, our congregation has welcomed a toddler with autism and other teenagers with intellectual disabilities. And here a new family sat, another unexpected indication that after years of this church welcoming Penny without any fanfare or special programs, other families with kids with disabilities might find this a safe and welcoming place, too. 

I gazed out upon the congregation and I saw the single moms. I saw the older man who was told as a child that he wasn’t smart, the one who is now reading through the Bible on his own and soaking in the story of God’s big, wide, long love for humanity. I saw the stories of loss and the stories of hope. 

We are the antithesis of Hillsong, in part because we are situated in rural Connecticut with an aging population. But ordinary churches can thrive in cities, too. The recent death of pastor and author Tim Keller, founder of Redeemer Church, also in New York City, underscores this truth. Yes, Keller’s preaching was extraordinary. And yet Redeemer worked hard not to become an extraordinary church. Keller himself was shaped and formed as a pastor in Hopewell, Virginia, with a small congregation of blue-collar workers. The spirit of that community carried to Redeemer, where Keller preached from behind a music stand wearing nondescript clothing flanked by traditional prayers and hymns. Keller established multiple churches throughout the city rather than one central megachurch dependent upon his presence.