On Patience
As we look ahead at our next season of life together at The Franconia-Springfield Mission (Eastertide, i.e., Easter Sunday until the Eve of Pentecost), our weekly homilies will focus on the virtue of patience. It’s been said that we overestimate what we can accomplish in a day and underestimate what we can accomplish in a year. I confess my own lack of faith when it comes to underestimating what God can do in a year, but I think that it is in that gap between my own expectations and God’s faithful deeds that God creates a holy space in which I can see His goodness and am transformed. As I looked at one year ago in my calendar, I noticed that on March 28, 2020 The Franconia-Springfield Mission had its very first interest meeting. Our original plan was to have people come to our house, listen to what God had put on our heart for a church to serve Franconia, Springfield, and Kingstowne, and to pray together. About one week before that, the pandemic shut everything down, we had to have our meeting online, and we faced the reality of starting a church virtually.
Sometimes things just don’t go the way we want them to go
I’ve had a chance to reflect on God’s faithfulness in this season in our annual report, so I won’t go into all those details here, but in only a year, several faithful households have become involved, we’ve hired part-time staff, and there is a plan for the year ahead. I really underestimated what God could do in one year. It is not lost on me that March 28, 2021 is as significant (if not more) than March 28, 2020. This year, on Palm Sunday, we end a season in which we were only meeting one Sunday per month to enter into a season in which TFSM will gather weekly to worship together as a community. Most of our community has been vaccinated, the weather is getting warmer, and this feels a bit like Exod 34:36 where the cloud is taken up and we are going on the next stage of our tabernacling journey. Things went differently than we anticipated, and it is in that space between what we expected and God’s faithful goodness that we are discovering God forming a community for His glory.
Continue to Be Patient
In this Eastertide we are going to focus our attention on the virtue of patience. Patience shows up frequently in the New Testament and the writings of the early church. It is a fruit of the Holy Spirit in Gal 5:22 and it is because of God’s patience that we are being saved (2 Pet 3:15). By the Holy Spirit, we bring this character of God to bear on the world around us by embodying it.
In a helpful book by Alan Kreider, entitled, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, he traces the theme of patience through the writings of Clement of Alexandria (150-215CE), Origen (d. ca. 254 CE), Tertullian (150-220 CE), Cyprian of Carthage (200-258 CE), and more. In the 250s, Carthage was hit by a terrible plague for which pagans began to blame Christians. Cyprian’s message to Christians was an exhortation to patience. There were not to give up, turn back to paganism, or to lash out; instead, Kreider says that “What Pontius [Cyprian’s biographer] does tell us is that Cyrprian responded to the crisis of the plague by urging the people to live lives marked by the habitus of patience—trusting God, living without being able to control the outcome, living unhurriedly, living unconventionally, loving their enemies.” (68). It would be an incredible testimony to the grace of God if the church became a “habitus of patience” whereby the world could see a people that trusts God, lives without being able to control the outcome, is unhurried, is unconventional, and loves their enemies. At TFSM, our vision is to become a common people in common prayer for uncommon transformation. The transformation produced by common prayer is the means by which we learn of God’s patience and what it means for our day-to-day experience.
Creating a Community of Patience
As we begin weekly worship we will focus on patience in various passages from our lectionary. We will have the Eucharist on the first Sunday of each month at Green Spring Gardens and we will hold morning prayer in my backyard on the other Sundays in the month (See our calendar here). During morning prayer, many voices from this new community will share the ways that God is teaching them about patience (and impatience!). We will have a chance to pray for one another, to be prayed for, to pray for the needs of our neighbors, and the world around us. We will once again learn what it feels like to worship somewhere together each week. We will begin putting the pieces together for children’s ministry, small groups, weekly Eucharist, and much more. Undergirding all of this will be a slow ferment as the early church had as we cultivate a community of patience. As things continue to occur in ways that we had not anticipated, we will seek God in the space between our expectations and His faithful goodness towards us so that we can see the patience of God produced in us.