Dear Rose Park,
A few weeks ago, I had breakfast at the Warm Friend on 8th street. Resthaven’s new director of Spiritual Care had reached out to local pastors hoping to get to know one another over breakfast; I love meeting new people and I love breakfast, so I replied right away. Growing up in Holland I have always had a small sense of awareness towards Resthaven and its’ many campuses, but I never knew the history.
In the 1940’s, seventeen churches in the Holland area banded together to provide residences for their widows. Slowly word spread around town and within a decade the waiting-list was longer than the available spaces. As a result, the first Resthaven campus was built on 32nd street (what is now Resthaven Maplewoods). Resthaven now offers a variety of locations with a variety of services and levels of care. The past, present, and future of Resthaven echoes with the faithfulness of God, but what warms my heart the most is the thought of seventeen churches coming together to serve their community with the love of Jesus.
We can barely get seventeen churches to agree whether coffee can be had in the sanctuary or not, let alone seventeen churches to come together to serve their community. Too often the Church finds itself in either competition with one another or downright aggression towards one another as lines are drawn in the sand about this issue or that issue. This seems like the antithesis of the psalmist’s voice in Psalm 133: How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!
The word ‘unity’ needs to be handled with care and grace; it is a word that is often hijacked to either subtly mean uniformity or a sense of compromise, so long as the opposing party compromises to agree with me. This is not what the word unity means in the context of Christianity. Instead, unity means we find a sense of identity, purpose, and mission in the person of Christ. This church can wear robes and sing hymns with the organ while that church can wear ripped jeans and blast popular Christian hits…and they can still find unity in Christ. This church can have a local mission focus through food pantries and literacy programs and that church can have a global mission focus through disaster relief and immigration advocacy…and they can still find unity in Christ, and unity in Christ will always be enough.
Seventeen churches in the Holland area put aside whatever differences they had in order to covenant together through the unity of Christ and serve the local community. This is a story that should be told over and over again because it is a story that needs to be heard and it is a story that can be relived. Might each and every one of us be an agent not of uniformity, but instead of unity through the body, blood, and love of Jesus.
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Mark
Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash