Backyard church and the smile of God
Across the fence a deacon from a local Catholic church sat on his back porch, strummed a guitar, and began singing a contemporary praise song in a beautiful tenor voice. Other people gradually overcame shyness and joined in.
On the other side of another fence, a spritely evangelical lady rejoiced that after weeks of quarantine that included a ban on gathering in churches, someone had finally listened to her plea for a neighborhood assembly to worship together and hear a message from the Bible. “People are so hungry to come together and hear the Word,” she had texted a neighbor.
So, a veteran Baptist pastor stood on his back porch, opening to a convergence of four other backyards and preached the gospel of the cross and resurrection.
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That pastor was me.
Looking at the little congregation spread over the backyards, and considering the variety of people gathered, I felt the smile of God.
Years ago, with a group in Israel, I had tried to preach on the hill regarded as the location for Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The sense of His manifest presence was so strong I couldn’t speak more than a few words without weeping. There was a purity about the place and moment, perhaps in our own spirits, but nevertheless so holy that we all were moved.
Backyard church wasn’t quite that strong, yet there was a sweet holiness about it that was cleansing and refreshing.
My wife and I agreed backyard church would go down as the most memorable Easter to this point in our lives — and we have been part of awesome services across the years.
On the previous Good Friday evening she and I had driven to a church parking lot and taken communion with other believers at a drive-in service. We watched as worshippers lifted their hands to the Lord by waving them outside car windows and honked their auto horns to raise up a hallelujah and shout an amen.
On the following Sunday as I preached at backyard church, I had the sense of confronting the principalities and powers of the “air” (Ephesians 6:12-18) and fallen nature itself with the proclamation of the Lord’s resurrection.
Easter morning really did redeem the time of the horrid Friday night.
Maybe one of the big things God is doing in this strange season we’re passing through now is allowing us to feel His delight that, whether we have access to a building or not, we will not forsake the assembling of ourselves together… that COVID-19 cannot quench our hallelujahs or stop Christ’s Church.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-building. I love the great cathedrals where designers sought to create towering works of art that would cause people to look up and contemplate the Lord’s transcendent majesty. I also delight in country church chapels scattered across my native southland. I rejoice in converted suburban shopping centers, buildings that function as churches on Sunday and gyms on Monday. I love old steepled structures raised in long-gone eras in city centers.
The earliest church apparently met in places built originally for other purposes: Catacombs, big commercial or official buildings called “basilicas,” and other public edifices. Finally, at some point in the third century a group of Christians designated a particular building along the Euphrates River in Syria, as “church.”
It’s understandable that Christ’s early followers wanted a sense of place within a locality, but along the way something regrettable happened: we began thinking of the structure as “church” rather than the gathering of the “living stones” that comprise Christ’s universal body as “church.”
Maybe that’s among the things God is teaching us: Christ’s Church is not a building, but the assembly of His people. Ecclesia, the New Testament Greek word translated “church,” teaches us that. It means “the called out” people. And there is another important dimension revealed in the German word, kirche, the Scots term, kirk, and the Greek, kuriakon. They all arise from kuriakos, another Greek term identifying that which belongs to a “lord,” or master.
Put it all together and you get ecclesia kuriakos — the group of people called out of the world and belonging to the Lord.
Perhaps that’s another of the great truths God is reviving among us right now.
So, I will never forget backyard church. And I will never sip a cup of morning coffee on my back porch again without noting with joy the place on the porch’s edge from which I preached to the “church” — and hopefully will again.
Wallace Henley is a former pastor, White House, and congressional aide. He served eighteen years as a teaching pastor at Houston's Second Baptist Church. Wallace, the author of more than twenty books, now does conferences on the church and culture, church growth and leadership. He is the founder of Belhaven University's Master of Ministry Leadership Degree.
