Luggage in the Sanctuary

Michelle Van Loon, and follow the link to read the rest:

Are you aware of the luggage others are carrying? 

If you attended a church service this weekend, you may have been sitting in a roomful of suitcases. There’s no way to tell what percentage of people in a given congregation are schlepping baggage from a previous negative church experience, but I suspect the numbers would startle even veteran church leaders. Bad baggage is often eagerly recycled by leaders. This may serve the needs of the organization. It may even be called good pastoral care by some leaders, who rationalize that putting hurting people back into service as quickly as possible will promote healing. In some cases, this may be true. But it is often self-serving expediency at work in this line of thinking.

I would like to suggest that creating an environment where it is safe for people to unpack their baggage is Discipleship 101 in a way that many other church activities packaged under that banner isn’t.

(Click here to read the first post in this series for descriptions of some of the bad baggage people carry with them into new churches.)

In addition to the nearly-invisible backpack (old pain hidden in needy, performance-driven behavior), the damaged-in-transit luggage (a warrior in search of a doctrinally-pure congregation), the steamer trunk (carrying ancient hurts from decades ago), and the invisible tote (the carrier lurking in the shadows, hoping not to be noticed), a couple of other categories were suggested to me: