Advent 3: A Testament of Faith — The Power of a Loving Church Community
cONTENT
Good morning friends, it is an honor and a privilege to be able to share my story with you all today. As Morgan said, my name is Spike Douglass, and together with my wife, Nasya, we are on staff here at Corpus Christi as your worship music directors. I am somewhat of a rarity here at Corpus Christi, in that I am what you would call a “cradle Anglican.” Both sides of my family have deep roots in the Episcopal and Anglican church, especially through my grandfather, who was an Anglican priest his whole career. However, in spite of that deep familial connection, (or maybe because of it), I didn’t really find a home for myself in the Anglican church until after college and into adulthood, which is when I really made my faith my own.
Today, as I share part of my story with you all, I want to frame it in the context of our passage from James, where we are called to be people of integrity in loving community who pray with faith. And within that call, there are three main ways of being that I want to focus on: the first is that the church community is patient, the second is that our community is prayerfully compassionate and confessional, and thirdly that our community is restorative. With that in mind, let me pray.
Lord, let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
So firstly, the church community is patient. I think one of the main ways my childhood faith journey was formed was really through patience. When I was quite young, about 5 years old, my family belonged to a small church mission. It was about the size that Corpus Christi was when I first started attending back in early 2022, about 30ish people on a good day.
This mission was a small group of people who were part of a well-established church on the far side of the Las Vegas Valley who were tired of driving an hour across town on a Sunday morning. I think a lot of my waiting during this time really came from waiting to see how, or if, our mission would grow and become more well-established.
As a kid, I remember my parents feeling proud that our little mission kept finding ways to survive, moving from hotel conference rooms to more permanent office space, and even being able to march in the annual Nevada Day parade in town one year! But overall, I also remember feeling the frustration of my parents on the stagnant size of the mission, and I think the effects of the 2008 recession drove the nail in the coffin for this small group, as our members were scattered across the country, and the world.
That scattering included my own family, as my dad was transferred to the international department of his company, and we moved to Doha, Qatar. Our patience looked different here, as the church family we found ourselves a part of was the largest Anglican church in the country. Our waiting here was for our permanent church building to be completed, which took 6 years from when we joined that church to the opening of that building.
The patience was well worth it, as the permanent building gave us a chance to centralize our church community in one place, support the smaller Anglican congregations in the country by providing them with a place to worship as well, and be a true representative of the Anglican Communion in Qatar.
But perhaps the biggest area of my faith journey where I exercised patience with the prayerful support of my church community was with my early relationship with Nasya. For those who don’t know, Nasya and I were high school sweethearts. We met in our youth group and started dating at the end of my senior year of high school, right before I moved away for college. For seven years, we were in a long-distance relationship, with Nasya in Doha, and then Canada, and myself at school in Virginia.
When people say long-distance relationships are hard, they’re not kidding! But thankfully, we both had a strong relationship with the Lord, and we were able to find comfort in him while apart, and the times we were together were even better because we were able to be in each other’s presence and get to pray together, worship together, and spend precious time together.
One of the things I remember most about that time spent apart from each other is actually how truly welcoming and excited all of you were in the lead up and anticipation of Nasya moving here to Northern Virginia! I will never forget the kind words you all shared with me during this time, whether it was sharing your excitement that she was coming, asking about ways to help her transition to life in the US, and especially the ways this church supported us last year during the lead up to our wedding. I know that this community was one of the main reasons Nasya and I were able to so quickly become comfortable living in this area and “doing life” with all of you.
The second way we are called to be a church community is by being prayerfully compassionate and confessional.
Some of my biggest faith moments have been through compassionate prayer. I remember in high school, I joined my youth group on several mission trips to Nepal, where we spent time meeting with the Nepali people in Kathmandu and the surrounding villages, taking time to talk with them, help with chores, hear about their daily struggles, and pray healing prayers for them.
I’ve seen the true power of prayer at work in these moments, where we heard that folks who prayed with us there saw miraculous healing of their injuries and maladies, and where we were able to discern through prayer the needs of the local community there and help in any way we could.
Prayer also doesn’t just need to be silent or spoken. One of the most powerful areas of prayer I have seen not only in my own faith journey, but in all the church communities I have been part of, has been through praise and worship. Some of my closest “come to Jesus” moments have been during worship. I regularly find myself overcome with emotion during the communal singing of hymns and songs of praise. In high school, Nasya and I were both worship leaders in our youth group, and it has been such a blessing to be able to continue to share the love we have for leading worship with Corpus Christi.
Confession has also been a powerful time of prayer and reconciliation for me. While in college, I did not have a church family, but I was part of a campus ministry in which I was heavily involved. The pastor here was a great man, strong in his faith and always ready to lend an ear to the students in his care. I felt very lost in my walk with Christ during college without a strong church foundation, and there were definitely times where I made some less-than-questionable decisions. But having a strong mentor in the faith to confess my shortcomings to and work through scripture together to find reconciliation helped me be able to set my heart right for post-graduation, and open my heart to finding a new church community again.
And this leads into my third point, which is that the church community is restorative.
After I graduated from college, I moved back to Las Vegas and back into my parents’ house. I found work on a ranch in central Nevada, where I lived and worked 4 days on and 3 days off at home. Since I was on the ranch over the weekends, I still did not have a church family to really plug into. I like to think of that summer working on the ranch as my days literally wandering the wilderness, not knowing what I was really doing with my life yet or how to get started.
After deciding I should actually figure out how to use the degree in Political Science I had just spent 4 years earning, I quit that job on the ranch and decided to take a leap of faith and move to the DC area to start looking for work. I had no job leads, no housing lined up other than my best friend’s couch for a couple of weeks, and no real community here. For the first three months living in Springfield, I was unemployed, living off my meager savings and whatever gig work I could occasionally find, and feeling like I had made a huge mistake. I consider this period of time as my days of figuratively continuing to wander the wilderness.
Eventually, I was able to find employment, and I was able to start getting back onto my feet. That Christmas was when I proposed to Nasya, and after returning to Springfield after the holidays, I decided that I was done finding excuses to not find a church to plug into. It was time to see if I had any real connection to the faith that my parents tried to instill in me growing up.
After literally googling, “Anglican churches near me,” Corpus Christi popped up as only a mile away from where I was living at the time, so I said, “What the heck,” and went to check it out that following Sunday.
I still vividly remember Morgan being taken aback that anyone would visit this little mission! The first thing he said to me after hello was, “How did you even find us??” I could tell even on my first visit that this church was where God was calling me to be.
I was instantly comfortable in the liturgy, finding it very close to what I was used to growing up, but with enough differences from how any church that I attended with my parents worshiped that I could call this church my own. I started becoming a regular attendee of Corpus Christi and participated in our first Members Sunday. I threw myself headfirst into being a member of the body of Christ in a way that felt completely natural and unforced. This congregation, you all have become a family for Nasya and me in a way that means so much to us, especially with our own families so far away.
In closing, the church community that has been built at Corpus Christi is one of the strongest, healthiest, and godliest communities I have been lucky enough to be a part of. Our call to be people of integrity in loving community who pray with faith is truly realized in the day-to-day interactions of the body of Christ here in Springfield, and I find myself lucky and blessed to be able to call this church my home.
