Natalya preached for the first time this past year. A potentially nerve-racking thing for anyone. However, her church family at Lambrick Church in Victoria, BC were such a gift to her during this experience. The youth pastor Aaron loves to engage the youth leaders in teaching opportunities and he had specifically asked her to consider preaching as a way to serve the church body. She felt seen and it made her consider how she ought to be contributing to church according to her spiritual gifts and how God has made her. She said yes and then joined the summer preaching team.
It was honouring.
It was intimidating.
This is a hard thing to do alone.
Is that why, in God’s great wisdom, God describes the people of God as a spiritual family, a living body?
So – with others – Natalya studied the story of Hagar from the Old Testament. Knowing that this is a heavy story, she didn’t want to mishandle it. There was a sense of responsibility that she didn’t take lightly. But together, with the rest of the summer preaching team, she got the support and tools she needed to know how to exegete a passage, glean background information from commentaries, and then communicate it in a way that made the truth and love of God visible for the congregation. Wrestling through the questions of how God is with us during difficult times and how to bear witness to the activity of God with other people of faith was not only helpful for her and her listeners, but it helped build a relationship of trust amongst the other summer preachers. For Natalya, her sermon – “How God Sees, Speaks, and Works in the Midst of our Brokenness” – was a faith-building exercise and a chance to experience the beauty of spiritual friendship within the Lambrick church community.
Isn’t this the beauty of a church body? Thanks be to God for healthy and life-giving communities of faith.