Jeff Delp's Blog
Sunday Stroll / 10.13.08, 12:28 PM
Sunday afternoons in the fall in the Delp household are usually reserved for football watching (either American or the world kind which we call soccer). This Sunday, I was watching the Falcons play an amazing game against the Bears, only to seemingly watch them lose the game late. The Bears scored a touchdown with 11 seconds to play, and since I needed to pick a friend up from the airport, I left to walk and get their car from their house so I could pick them up. As I was walking through my neighborhood, I noticed several houses also tuned into the game which was not yet over. About halfway to the house, I heard an enormous roar come from multiple directions. Clearly something exciting happened in the game so I picked up my pace to get to the car and turn on the radio and find out what happened. Low and behold, the Falcons had won with an unlikely come from behind victory.
While I was sad that I had not been a faithful fan and stuck it out until the end, it was fun to listen to everyone be excited while i was walking the streets. I realized how routing for the local team (I am still a Philadelpha fan because that is where I grew up) can really bond and unite a community of people together. I felt like I belong to something greater, and it was fun to be able to talk with people about the game later that day and again the next morning. The Falcons game served as a way to unite us as a community, even if only for a brief moment in time.
Every Sunday evening my wife, son, and myself walk to our church which meets in our neighborhood, and this Sunday was no different, it just happened to be 1 hour after I had the prior experience. On the way to church, we walk by people we know, people we don’t know, and walk with people who are going to church with us. Our church intentionally tries to be a neighborhood church, meaning most of us live in the neighborhood. However, the vast majority of people that live in South Atlanta go to other churches, mostly outside our neighborhood. So while we our a community church, I would not call us “the” community church.
As I walked to church last night, I couldn’t help but wish that walking to and from church could serve as the same uniting factor for our community as watching a football game together. Where when we walked home the questions we asked to people we passed along the street were: Man, how about that sermon? or, Wow, dinner was good tonight, what did you think? or, the worship was really inspiring, wasn’t it?. I wish that these were the questions that I could ask my neighbors of I walked along Jonesboro Road instead of just talking about the football game.
I appreciate our community church, and I know that our little expression of what we believe church to be is much more of the community than most churches these days. But I still long for the days of the parish church, where people went to the church down the street from them merely because it was down the street and not because of the theology, worship, pastor, family programs, or whatever else. A day when you were known by your neighbors for being a neighbor, a church member, a fellow parent at the school, a co-worker, and a fellow patron at the local restaurants/coffee shops/stores.
Our little community in South Atlanta is slowly and surely becoming a place like I long for in my dreams. With the opening of a coffeeshop, our church building we have been in for a year now, more and more neighbors being intentional about living their lives in South Atlanta, and outside factors such as high gas prices and a bad economy, I feel like we have turned a corner in creating a healthy community to live in for our family, and other families in the neighborhood. We still have a long way to go, but it is getting better and I can’t wait for the day when our stroll home from church along Jonesboro Rd will be laden with conversations about how the service was today.
0 Comments
Leave a Comment...
Read more of Jeff Delp's Blogs.
